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The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

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

#211

Post by yencabulator »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #47
akerl_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding trademarks. As an example: if I buy a 12 pack of Coke, I can set up a table and sell them one can at a time. Trademarks require that I don't present that I'm sponsored by Coke, or label my non-Coke as Coke, or a variety of other things that would confuse consumers. That's the entire premise of trademarks: avoiding consumer confusion. To your example: Debian had to rename their package…

Considering that trademarks have a long case law with being used to force redistributors offline (i.e. to force my app to not be available on Download.com); I think it is fair to say that it is well established that a trademark gives the owner total distribution control except where the first-sale doctrine intervenes (resale of a product acquired through a legal seller). That doctrine only exists for physical product…

In the real world, Coca-Cola would "force a redistributor offline" by not selling them products, and setting up agreements with their distributors to limit who they can sell to. That's not trademark, and it doesn't transfer to free software.

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

#212

Post by wakawaka28 »

alexjplant wrote: post #44
rincebrain wrote: post #42

This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…

Don't link to this guy's site. He has a serious personal problem with every reader of HN (including the vast majority he's never met and knows nothing about) and serves an NSFW image to anybody that has this site in the referrer request header.

Sounds like you're the one with the personal problem. Let people read and link to what they want, and mind your business.

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

#213

Post by ziml77 »

sofixa wrote: post #200
poulpy123 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just install it through the package manager and it just works. It just works if the software you require is not only provided by your speciic distribution but also you require the specific version of the software that is provided by your specific distribution. Good luck if it not the case. For windows or mac, 1 or 2 files each cover all systems from the last 10 years or more. It's not by masochism that people reg…

> For windows or mac, 1 or 2 files each cover all systems from the last 10 years or more. Utter nonsense. What about code signing? A 10 year old installer won't be signed, and Windows/mac will scream at you about malware and you might have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it actually installed. > You compare hunting for pirated software to installing open source software Pirated? How do you download MS Office?…

It's really not that hard. On Windows you just tell SmartScreen to install anyway. On macOS once you've changed the system setting to allow unsigned executables, you right click and choose open and then tell it to run anyway. In both cases it won't bother you about it again for that executable.

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

#214

Post by arielcostas »

yencabulator wrote: post #209
immibis wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard it was a Fedora-wide effort to make its own flatpaks, but I don't really know why.

Well, for one, Flatpak is a stupid design where the downloaded software gets to tell the system what if any sandboxing is applied. The way to have it be a security boundary is by enforcing the packaging :-(

You as a user can decide to install (or not) flatpaks based on their sandboxing settings, or even edit them with a tool like Flatseal. Which is a huge advancement compared to just allowing any binary to do any change in your system (with enough permissions of course).

Also, distributions can also provide their flatpak repos (or even another third party) and vet the packages with their own set of rules (such as "no packages with full filesystem access").

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

#215

Post by finnthehuman »

worble wrote: post #14
iamjackg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>the claim from Fedora is

Who cares what they claim? Flatpak was invented specifically to route around finger wagging distro maintainers.

Fedora has OBS in their native repos. They can go apply all their opinions to that copy. And if they're as right as they think they are, I'm sure upstream will be happy to take their patches for inclusion in the next flathub release.

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

#216

Post by cperciva »

ddtaylor wrote: post #23
cperciva wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple answer: Whoever the upstream decides should do it. For my code I'm very happy to have distributions shipping packages because it means the code is available more easily for users and with less work from me -- but if a distro was shipping a broken package I would absolutely say "please stop doing that".

It's free and open software we specifically give the right to modify and redistribute.

Sure. But having the legal right to do something doesn't mean that you should do it, only that you are allowed to do it.

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

#217

Post by rincebrain »

robertlagrant wrote: post #192
midtake wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is the most stable distro for a reason. They don't rebase from upstream every 30 minutes because it is a community project. It is wonderful that volunteers have continued the Debian project for so long. In contrast, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a distro funded by IBM and countless faceless backers, has recently stopped patching many vulnerabilities, recommending to their users to rely on mitigations instead, desp…

Where is the "every 30 minutes" coming from? You and another commenter have both used this identical phrase.It sounds as though the complaint was not because a patch hadn't been applied after 30 minutes, or even 30 days or 30 weeks. More like 30 months.

I said "every 30 minutes" as a piece of hyperbole, in my original comment.

I'm not really sure why everyone is focusing on that phrase, though. I think it's pretty clear if you read any of the source material, as said, that that is not an accurate representation of what was going on, and I would have also expected "every 30 minutes" to be a pretty clearly hyperbolic expectation for anyone to process updates after.

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

#218

Post by smaudet »

nindalf wrote: post #186
fragmede wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when it's your screensaver, and I can break into your computer using a bug that's been publicized, so every idiot with access to Google knows about it, yes there's something wrong with running old software. that's just my opinion though. btw, where's your office?

Yeah, but it's a problem for the person who wants to run old software. It's their choice, I support that choice. As long as it doesn't affect me, I'm fully supportive. Of course I'll be affected if my data is stored on such a server, but I'm assuming some level of competence here. I personally run on latest, apply all updates zealously within a week or two.

I don't like leaving this decision up to either the maintainers or the author, TBH.

They have different goals/purposes, often, and they frequently don't line up with my own.

Maintainers are exhausting in their own right, they do a ton of work and so they think their decisions are more important because of the work they do, user be damned...

Authors usually only care about their version of the software.

I think, a better medium, would be if a third party is packaging an application, perhaps they should always explicitly state they are the ones packaging it. Then there is less confusion.

Or, you know, let the author keep control of that...

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

#219

Post by bigiain »

thomasfedb wrote: post #152
bigiain wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty obvious it wasn't malice that led them to not respond quickly. So stupidity then. Seems legit.

That’s a poor faith comment. I’m a Fedora packager (not for this package). Like many others I have an unrelated day job. If there’s an upstream complaint I might get to it this weekend, maybe next. If I’m busy for a few weeks that doesn’t make me stupid. Have had my share of “discussions” with upstream who want the latest version packaged when this might not be completely in line with our guidelines. Not an uncommon…

> That’s a poor faith comment.

Less of a poor faith comment, more like a badly landed gag. In my head, everybody would have known I was riffing off:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

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

#220

Post by robertlagrant »

rincebrain wrote: post #217
robertlagrant wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the "every 30 minutes" coming from? You and another commenter have both used this identical phrase.It sounds as though the complaint was not because a patch hadn't been applied after 30 minutes, or even 30 days or 30 weeks. More like 30 months.

I said "every 30 minutes" as a piece of hyperbole, in my original comment. I'm not really sure why everyone is focusing on that phrase, though. I think it's pretty clear if you read any of the source material, as said, that that is not an accurate representation of what was going on, and I would have also expected "every 30 minutes" to be a pretty clearly hyperbolic expectation for anyone to process updates after.

> I'm not really sure why everyone is focusing on that phrase, though

Is everyone focusing on the phrase? I thought I asked about it, and that's all that's happened.

> I would have also expected "every 30 minutes" to be a pretty clearly hyperbolic expectation for anyone to process updates after

I couldn't imagine a benign use of hyperbole in timeliness when some expectations of timeliness are silly, and some are sensible. I thought I'd ask, in case there was a good faith reason for it, rather than just assume you're trying to use insinuation to change people's minds.

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