Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

gitlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 229 posts

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#11

Post by mulmen »

kattagarian wrote: post #4

Why would fedora have their own version of OBS studio when the package is already supported by the official team on flathub? Isn't this exactly the reason why flatpak was created, to avoid all the needless packaging that every distro had to do in order to install the program?

Flatpak provides an alternative to the distro package but the distro package is still useful. The distro package provides tighter integration with the OS and provides stability guarantees that Flatpak does not. The distro version also allows an OS deployment with a single tool. They’re both useful.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#12

Post by [deleted] »

kattagarian wrote: post #4

Why would fedora have their own version of OBS studio when the package is already supported by the official team on flathub? Isn't this exactly the reason why flatpak was created, to avoid all the needless packaging that every distro had to do in order to install the program?

[deleted]

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#13

Post by like_any_other »

denkmoon wrote: post #5
boredatoms wrote: post #2

Linux distributions have often whitelabeled software that make trademark threats

Seems perfectly reasonable and would achieve the desired goal of making it clear it's a third party package not "official" OBS.

That is in fact one of the solutions proposed by OBS: "We would like to request that this package is either removed, or made clear that it is a third party package."

Which seems pretty reasonable to me, so I can't really fault OBS here.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#14

Post by worble »

iamjackg wrote: post #10
tuananh wrote: post #3

who should do packaging for each distro? - upstream maintainer: too much work. each distro requires certain best practices/convention. - distro: may not meet certain standard set by upstream maintainer.

Well, in this case it seems like there already is an official Flatpak, but Fedora is overriding it with their own, which is of lower quality. The problem was already solved, unless Fedora is claiming that their Flatpak is better in some specific way.

From what I can tell reading the pagure.io thread (https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-95541...) the claim from Fedora is that is that OBS is using an EOL qt. It's hard to follow exactly what the issues are with the Fedora flatpak but I can only assume they forcefully updated qt and that's what caused the issues (just a guess from the context).

There's a lot of interesting debate in the linked thread about Fedora giving leeway to "verified" flatpaks, or what they're calling "probably safe" apps that do not request too many permissions, so even if there are vulnerabilities in the source then due to the nature of flatpaks, they won't be able to cause much harm.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#15

Post by tecleandor »

stolen_biscuit wrote: post #9

Does anyone have more context for the name-calling and poor communication from the Fedora team? Seems like pretty poor behaviour from them if true

This thread is giant, but I feel like it could come from here (and further responses):

https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-95541...

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#16

Post by Cyph0n »

tuananh wrote: post #3

who should do packaging for each distro? - upstream maintainer: too much work. each distro requires certain best practices/convention. - distro: may not meet certain standard set by upstream maintainer.

Upstream if they want to. Downstream if no official upstream package is available.

Downstream can have their own package either way, as long as it’s marked as unofficial.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#17

Post by nikitalita »

ajross wrote: post #6

Meh. Seems like there's some unstated background context here. The proximate cause isn't the linked bug at OBS, it's this bug report to Fedora: https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463 Basically it demands that the FlatPak be removed from the repository citing "problems" that aren't detailed. Then 22 days later they start throwing bombs on their own gitlab (again, without details about what the problems with th…

It seems that issues started here:

https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-95541...

Basically, the discussion somehow got turned into berating the OBS team for relying on an EOL runtime (which, as they carefully explain, was due to regressions when upgrading). I assume that waiting three weeks for any sort of movement and then getting insults in return is what caused them to reach for the nuclear option.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#18

Post by akerl_ »

Given that OBS is GPL licensed, any legal action would have to be trademark-based, right?

It feels like they'd have a hard time making that case, since package repositories are pretty clearly not representing themselves as the owners of, or sponsored by, the software they package.

Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

#19

Post by dismalaf »

akerl_ wrote: post #18

Given that OBS is GPL licensed, any legal action would have to be trademark-based, right? It feels like they'd have a hard time making that case, since package repositories are pretty clearly not representing themselves as the owners of, or sponsored by, the software they package.

> Given that OBS is GPL licensed, any legal action would have to be trademark-based, right?

Yup. The issue isn't the code but misrepresentation of the origin. It's like back in the day when Debian "forked" Firefox for reasons...

Edit - worded it poorly - never meant to imply Debian did anything wrong, only that they changed the branding to respect Firefox's trademark and avoid the situation that OBS is threatening Fedora with.

Post reply on HN