Guix indeed has a strong commitment to user freedom, which makes it a different project.
Technically, I don't see it as "duplicating" Nix: Guix uses low-level parts of Nix that are awesome, and replaces higher-level layers with a more integrated and unified system. See https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4584 for the technical rationale or the video on the home page on the concrete impact of those differences. Hacking GuixSD is a very different experience, I think!
(Disclaimer: I maintain Guix and I'm a former NixOS hacker.)
Does the Guix team have any interest in adding documentation to the Nix source code? Presumably you guys know a lot more about it than the average developer. I haven't spent a huge amount of time looking through the Nix source, but the times when I've had, I've found the documentation to be very anemic.
Random lazy question: do you know about running GuixSD on AWS EC2? We're very happy with NixOS's AMI images, since they let us provision AWS instances extremely easily.
Technically, I don't see it as "duplicating" Nix: Guix uses low-level parts of Nix that are awesome, and replaces higher-level layers with a more integrated and unified system. See https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4584 for the technical rationale or the video on the home page on the concrete impact of those differences. Hacking GuixSD is a very different experience, I think!
(Disclaimer: I maintain Guix and I'm a former NixOS hacker.)