For those who aren’t aware, recently OBS was added to Fedora Flatpaks. OBS reported that the package was broken. The Fedora Flatpak maintainer didn’t want to remove it, which eventually led to OBS threatening legal action.
Side note: the issues with the Fedora Flatpak are twofold. Only official builds of OBS get certain features. The other issue is Fedora’s stance on proprietary and patented software limits what they can include. In my testing, the Fedora Flatpak worked fine for my basic screen recording use case.
The part which confuses me is how people are reacting to this. People seem to support the fact that this escalated to threatening legal action.
But at the same time, what Fedora is doing is really no different to what all other distros are doing. Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and OBS Studio all also package unofficial versions that lack features because they don’t have access to the OBS API key.
I get preferring getting your packages from upstream. I can get not liking Fedora Flatpaks. But supporting legal action against a FOSS project for providing a downstream package, even if it’s a “bad” one? That’s just crazy to me.
It’s gets even funnnier (in a sad way) because a few years ago Red Hat donated $10k to OBS after they made the Flathub package official. And now OBS is threatening legal action against Fedora for providing an unofficial flatpak.
The Fedora flatpak having issues makes OBS look bad to people who don’t realize it’s not official. They’re getting complaints over issues that people are having from the unofficial flatpak.
Fedora could have avoided the legal issue by either making it clear to users installing their flatpak that it was not the official version, or by de-prioritizing their version, as OBS requested. They did neither.
Does it suck that one FOSS project is suing another FOSS project? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not justified.
making it clear to users installing their flatpak that it was not the official version
I wonder how it would be best to go about this. Warning in the installer or first time opening the software store that by installing Fedora, you will be installing software packaged by Fedora by default? Or should literally every package shipped by Fedora be prefixed by Unofficial?
Mastodon has methods to verify if you own a particular website, and it shows up with a verification stamp on your profile if you do that (otherwise it’s just a URL). Other platforms similarly have ways to verify that you’re the official source of something.
Seems reasonable that Flatpaks should also have some way to verify, maybe through PGP.
Flathub has their own verification program that shows up in Gnome Software and Discover. So if you have Flathub enabled, you will see those checkmarks on most apps, but none on apps that are also in Fedora Flatpaks since that has a higher priority than Flathub.
So maybe the reverse is needed. Rather than showing checkmarks for verified Flathub apps, also show ticks that a package is not managed by the upstream developers and so you shouldn’t report issues to them.
That’s a good idea. Redundancy seems like a good goal for something like this
I don’t know a lot about flathub, but other package managers show you warnings for different circumstances asking you if you want to continue installing. I can’t imagine it would be too complicated to flag a package to give a similar warning and require the user to acknowledge before installing.
Always funny seeing open source developers crying about people making use of the rights that was granted them by those same developers. Don’t want people to touch your precious code? Then make it proprietary, and you will be the king of them hill. Nobody made them open source it in the first place, it the choice they made while presumably being aware of consequences.
In Dscover Flatpacks usually show “recommended” on respective selections etc. so I’m confused what’s the noise is about. Personally I’m never confused where I’m installing Flatpack from
