Fedora threatened with legal action from OBS Studio due to their Flatpak packaging
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Great article, BTW
I disagree, the headline is clickbaity and implies that there is some ongoing conflict. The fact that the Fedora flatpak package maintainer pushed an update marking it EOL, with "The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build." in the
end-of-lifemetadata field the day before this article was written is not mentioned until the second-to-last sentence of it. (And the OBS maintainer has since said "For the moment, the EOL notice is sufficient enough to distance ourselves from the package that a full rebrand is not necessary at this time, as we would rather you focus efforts on the long-term goal and understand what that is.")The article also doesn't answer lots of questions such as:
- Why is the official OBS flatpak using an EOL'd runtime?
- Why did Fedora bother to maintain both their own flatpak and an RPM package of OBS?
- What are the problems with the Fedora Flatpak, anyway? (there is some discussion of that here... but it's still not clear to me)
- What is the expected user experience going to be for users who have the Fedora flatpak installed, now that it is marked EOL? Will it be obvious to them that they can/should use the flathub version, or will the EOL'd package in the Fedora flatpak repo continue to "outweigh" it?
Note again that OBS's official flathub flatpak is also marked EOL currently, due to depending on an EOL runtime. Also, from the discussion here it is clear that simply removing the package (as the OBS dev actually requested) instead of marking it EOL (as they did) would leave current users continuing to use it and unwittingly missing all future updates.
TLDR: this is all a mess, but, contrary to what the article might lead people to believe, the OBS devs and Fedora devs appear to be working together in good faith to do the best thing for their users. The legal threat (which was just in an issue comment, not sent formally by lawyers) was only made because Fedora was initially non-responsive, but they became responsive prior to this article being written.
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Fedora's opinion seems to be that upgrading is always the right choice, which we disagree with.
Ugh, I'm glad people are willing to fight back against these kinds of assertions.
Regardless of who is right, facilitating and encouraging this kind of discourse is how we end up with better software for everyone.
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It's important to acknowledge that nothing is completely secure.
I didn't know this was an issue for OBS because I'm not experiencing any problems nor am I seeing anyone else.
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thankfully arch isn’t getting into this nonsense
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Great explanation.
If I were the OBS devs, I'd make a clear indication on their website when reporting bugs that the fedora version of OBS is unsupported for, well, the reasons they don't support it.
It seems way more effective than threatening legal repercussions.
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Why did Fedora make their packages take priority? Is it because the priority is otherwise random and if you don’t have a priority set, that leads to the issue they mentioned? Because if so, that sounds like a reasonable action by Fedora and like the real culprit is Flathub.
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They put their repo first on the list. Packages will default to Fedora's repo if available. You may specify which version you want, if you both know that it's happening and know that the package you want in particular is available at both.
I really again do not know how this could possibly be the fault of another repository. Fedora is making decisions for ther distro that circumvent FlatHub, this is not FlatHub's fault.
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They put their repo first on the list.
Right. And are we talking about the list for OBS or of repos in general? I doubt Fedora sets the priority on a package level. And if they don’t, and if there are some other packages in Flathub that are problematic, then it makes sense to prioritize their own repo over them.
That said, if those problematic packages come from other repositories, or if not but there’s another alternative to putting their repo first that would have prevented unofficial builds from showing up first, but wouldn’t have deprioritized official, verified ones like OBS, then it’s a different story. I haven’t maintained a package on Flathub like the original commenter you replied to but I don’t get the impression that that’s the case.
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I believe the reason Fedora does this is to satisfy their regulatory goals, I don't know the full story behind why they have their own seemingly broken build of OBS on their repo but I would imagine it has something to do with a codec's worldwide licensing rights or similar. I believe the approach that should be taken is that Fedora should stop offering this package in a broken state as compared to continuing to do so, but that's an outsider opinion.
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Oh 100% agreed - in this instance, it’s clear that OBS has a well maintained package that should be prioritized. But they could keep their repo first and remove OBS (and other known-to-be-well-maintained apps) from it to accomplish that.
