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 xscreensaver that had been fixed for a long time in upstream but e.g. Debian doesn't just ship upstream updates every 30 minutes. He requested Debian stop shipping it (or update it? I didn't go reread the entire chain before replying), Debian declined.
He then put in a piece of code that popped up a notification if the system time was sufficiently far past the hardcoded value, informing people they should upgrade, and Debian debated patching his message out.
People who actually use Debian and similar distros will disagree. In their view there’s nothing wrong with shipping older, patched versions of open sourced software. The license says they can do it!
So they grossly understate the problem, make it seem like it’s the person authoring the software at fault or the one who’s being unreasonable.
They’re quick to tell you how great the maintainers are, how much effort they put in for free but they don’t share that same love for the author of the package. You know, the person who actually wrote the software. They don’t acknowledge that without the author they’d have no software to begin with, and that providing support to older versions of software is a cost to the author. Not just older, but possibly broken in subtle ways because of the patches applied on top. The author still gets all the blame and all the support requests for changes they didn’t make.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to run old, stable software. No one questions that their distro is “the most stable”. That they cannot or will not see the costs of doing so on the author is a shortcoming, but there’s no solving that.
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, despite the availability of upstream patches.
Furthermore, the recent vulnerability threatscape is inundated with CVE hunters who are desperate to call the most minor degradation of service a vulnerability. For a community project (and apparently an enterprise-serving megacorporation), this causes patching fatigue.
This doesn’t seem similar at all. Debian didn’t break xscreensaver, they merely shipped a two-year old version at some point, in line with their stable releases. This is unlike how Fedora apparently broke their own OBS repackage.
Yeah, I'm a bit disappointed at how quickly the perception turned against OBS. Maybe I'm missing something, but their "threats" actually seem pretty reasonable: They asked Fedora to stop shipping a broken version of OBS/make it clear that the Fedora version is unofficial, they got absolutely no response for three weeks, then they requested that Fedora cease using the OBS trademarks. This is not like xscreensaver, this is much closer to Firefox/Iceweasel/etc.
> Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect
That's rich, coming from a project very closely tied to Gtk, which has a history of massive breaking changes, and outright removing functionality, leading to many projects continuing to use older versions of gtk for a very long time.
Many different people have different priorities in fedora.
I believe they mainly remove functionality between major releases of GTK, not within a release. Can you cite an example where they have done this between gtk minor releases ? Aka gtk 3.1 -> 3.2 ?
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.
I find it insane that everybody is seemingly okay with the fact that websites get to know what a user was browsing before landing on their site. And that there's no straightforward way to disable this behavior without the use of extensions.
Honestly it's refreshing to see someone in tech stand up to the VC-only vision of what tech can be. I still enjoy HN, but got a good laugh at image that popped up and agreed he has a point.
He seems to have a pretty good grasp of the average commenter here, I don't know what your problem is with him exercising his free speech rights on his own website to deal with people he feels that way about.
You can hate jwz as much as you want but the fact remains that probably 95% of ycombinator funded startups couldn't exist without making extensive use of the gpl, bsd, Apache and similar licensed software produced by a lot of open source curmudgeons and greybeards.
Many of whom share his same opinion on VCs and late stage capitalism.
More importantly, the link to the referenced article, properly marked up, since some quorum of nincompoops who hate the Web flagged the other comment destroying the link for any user/agent without showdead on (which will include every agent not operated by a user):
>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.
Why do they still mingle with sw distributions? Wasn't the sandboxed blob trend born also to try blackbox strategies and have parallel versions without dealing with too much hell? Was that laziness/economical advantage (EOL'd library, no business in porting fixes, upgrade to the latest and greatest) or something else?
Backwards compatibility is not in style anymore. Upgrading several libs system-wide is likely to cause breakage in old apps. A statically linked application doesn't rot (because linux guarantees userspace compatibility). By "doesn't rot" I mean "will keep running indefinitely without requiring some maintainer to keep working on the code indefinitely."
I don't understand what the big deal was there. Debian has its own bug tracker for all of its packages so the distro maintainers get bothered about bugs in old packages shipped by the stable version of Debian rather than upstream developers. JWZ decided to voluntarily subscribe to the Debian bug tracker for his package and then add a nag screen and start a flame war over them shipping an old version.
When you look at the about box, does it say Debian Screensaver based on xscreensaver, or does it say xscreensaver? When you Google the name of the program, whose website comes up first?
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?
The idea behind it is really for corporate uses of Fedora/GNOME. Sysadmins, through Fedora Flatpack, can re-package certain software from Flathub in accordance with their draconian corporate policies.
As a person that has had to endure stupid corporate policies and since Fedora is _mostly_ used in corporate workstation. I can understand this.
What I don't understand why it's the _default_ to prefer Fedora Flatpack software over Flathub. For people that are just getting into linux, I can see why that's painful and the UX to be terrible.
"I installed Z software. It installed some junk re-package. I only realized it installed junk re-package after a week of investigation. Installing it from different source and now it works. Thanks, Fedora! I wasted a week of my time!"
From what I've read the Fedora project has an interest in providing solely open source and non patent encumbered software like codecs. Which sounds like something OBS may infringe on
Sounds like if the want to provide their own forked and less functional versions of software, they should rebrand the software like distros used to do with Firefox. Rather than cripple it and leave people blaming OBS.
My understanding is that OBS is licensed in a free compatible license, so why someone in specific wants to keep maintaining any and all versions seems moot.
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.
The distro package in question here is a Fedora-specific Flatpak, not the Fedora-specific RPM distro package version. From my understanding, it is missing things like patented codecs which then causes bug reports to be filed with upstream, OBS, instead of the ones responsible for the package, Fedora.
Fedora has its own Flatpak repo as the default instead of Flathub (which has the official OBS package from the upstream developers).
Last time I checked, Flathub was rife with unofficial packages posing as official ones (using the URL of upstream, with no verification, when the upstream dev has no association to the package).
That's the main reason I never took Flatpak seriously.
It's greatly improved with Flathub's "Verified apps" [1] implementation, but you can make similar arguments about downstream packaging (e.g. from distros) not being clear about being independent of "offical" builds.
It's also very worth noting that `Fedora's Flatpaks` are sourced separate from the "Main" `Flathub` service which most people expect flatpaks are generally being sourced from which has many "official" flatpak releases of software directly from projects leading to extra confusion.
Flathub itself is fairly auditable (but not trivially so) and built through their CI, but I still agree that the unofficial packages are often of questionable security/quality.
That said, Many of the "native" (e.g. not Flatpak) distro packages are using far from supported/official builds with often missing/broken features and it's an unreasonable support burden when nearly all of issues related to distro packaging end up on the upstream issue trackers/support channels.
It's especially troublesome when the upstream has official builds available and it's unclear to the user reporting issues that they are not actually using official builds.
I am a happy Fedora user, but the "Software" application it ships with has always been a joke. Pushing flatpaks (and especially poorly-maintained ones like this) has made it worse.
When I open Software I always think it's going to be a clean GTK interface for dnf. But it appears to just do its own thing, and I've learned not to trust the app listings in there.
These two comments stand out to me as inappropriate (directed at OBS).
> keeping up with runtime updates is one of the most basic expectations of a maintainer, and I suspect it's a sign there may be other problems as well.
> I won't mince words: allowing the runtime to go EOL is unacceptable and indicates terrible maintainership.
I don't use Fedora but I do use OBS… on Mac, because OBS is hands-down the most popular application for streaming on any platform. It's crazy that OBS works great on Mac, works great on Windows, works great on Linux if using the OBS Flatpak, and when the Fedora-packaged-flatpak breaks and this Fedora guy starts saying that this is indicative that "there may be other problems".
If OBS isn't good enough for Fedora to ship a working version, then show me the streaming software that is.
Not really and I wasted my time browsing a massive thread of non-sense where people were arguing for and against "Fedora Flatpack is better than Flathub" software and vice-versa.
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.
> This is a formal request to remove all of our branding, including but not limited to, our name, our logo, any additional IP belonging to the OBS Project
Honestly it sounds very reasonable, if you want to fork it's fine, but don't have people report bugs upstream if you're introducing them.
I mean, I think the right fix is just for Fedora to stop packaging their own version. But I think that's about being good people; I don't think there's a strong legal argument here for forcing Fedora to do that.
> 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.
That's sort of the difference, isn't it? Debian forked Firefox and changed the code, so they had to rename it. But this doesn't look like changing the code, it's building it with different versions of its dependencies / different wrapping around it. Maybe there's a case here, but it feels pretty tenuous.
Readit News
For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against xscreensaver that had been fixed for a long time in upstream but e.g. Debian doesn't just ship upstream updates every 30 minutes. He requested Debian stop shipping it (or update it? I didn't go reread the entire chain before replying), Debian declined.
He then put in a piece of code that popped up a notification if the system time was sufficiently far past the hardcoded value, informing people they should upgrade, and Debian debated patching his message out.
[1] - jwz dot org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop-shipping-xscreensaver/
(Link turned into not a link because I had forgotten how jwz feels about HN referrers.)
This grossly understates the problem.
The debian xscreensaver package was years old, and contained bugs related to screen locking which were an actual security issue.
Your comment is in very poor taste.
So they grossly understate the problem, make it seem like it’s the person authoring the software at fault or the one who’s being unreasonable.
They’re quick to tell you how great the maintainers are, how much effort they put in for free but they don’t share that same love for the author of the package. You know, the person who actually wrote the software. They don’t acknowledge that without the author they’d have no software to begin with, and that providing support to older versions of software is a cost to the author. Not just older, but possibly broken in subtle ways because of the patches applied on top. The author still gets all the blame and all the support requests for changes they didn’t make.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to run old, stable software. No one questions that their distro is “the most stable”. That they cannot or will not see the costs of doing so on the author is a shortcoming, but there’s no solving that.
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, despite the availability of upstream patches.
Furthermore, the recent vulnerability threatscape is inundated with CVE hunters who are desperate to call the most minor degradation of service a vulnerability. For a community project (and apparently an enterprise-serving megacorporation), this causes patching fatigue.
That's rich, coming from a project very closely tied to Gtk, which has a history of massive breaking changes, and outright removing functionality, leading to many projects continuing to use older versions of gtk for a very long time.
I believe they mainly remove functionality between major releases of GTK, not within a release. Can you cite an example where they have done this between gtk minor releases ? Aka gtk 3.1 -> 3.2 ?
Fedora KDE is literally release blocking and has been approved for promotion to be on the same level as Fedora Workstation.
Highly recommend installing https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smart-referer
https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png
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Many of whom share his same opinion on VCs and late stage capitalism.
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<https://jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop-shi...>
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- https://bugs.gentoo.org/101619
- https://bugs.gentoo.org/124595
And Quod Libet vs. Debian (2007):
- https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=421167
- https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454
https://web.archive.org/web/20070307113840/http://modeemi.fi...
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=413469
Why do they still mingle with sw distributions? Wasn't the sandboxed blob trend born also to try blackbox strategies and have parallel versions without dealing with too much hell? Was that laziness/economical advantage (EOL'd library, no business in porting fixes, upgrade to the latest and greatest) or something else?
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The idea behind it is really for corporate uses of Fedora/GNOME. Sysadmins, through Fedora Flatpack, can re-package certain software from Flathub in accordance with their draconian corporate policies.
As a person that has had to endure stupid corporate policies and since Fedora is _mostly_ used in corporate workstation. I can understand this.
What I don't understand why it's the _default_ to prefer Fedora Flatpack software over Flathub. For people that are just getting into linux, I can see why that's painful and the UX to be terrible.
"I installed Z software. It installed some junk re-package. I only realized it installed junk re-package after a week of investigation. Installing it from different source and now it works. Thanks, Fedora! I wasted a week of my time!"
Fedora has its own Flatpak repo as the default instead of Flathub (which has the official OBS package from the upstream developers).
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That's the main reason I never took Flatpak seriously.
It's also very worth noting that `Fedora's Flatpaks` are sourced separate from the "Main" `Flathub` service which most people expect flatpaks are generally being sourced from which has many "official" flatpak releases of software directly from projects leading to extra confusion.
Flathub itself is fairly auditable (but not trivially so) and built through their CI, but I still agree that the unofficial packages are often of questionable security/quality.
That said, Many of the "native" (e.g. not Flatpak) distro packages are using far from supported/official builds with often missing/broken features and it's an unreasonable support burden when nearly all of issues related to distro packaging end up on the upstream issue trackers/support channels.
It's especially troublesome when the upstream has official builds available and it's unclear to the user reporting issues that they are not actually using official builds.
[1] https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-users/verification/
When I open Software I always think it's going to be a clean GTK interface for dnf. But it appears to just do its own thing, and I've learned not to trust the app listings in there.
I still uninstall it and use apt instead (and "downgrade" packages that are wrappers around snaps, and block snapd from being able to install...).
...why?
https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-95541...
> keeping up with runtime updates is one of the most basic expectations of a maintainer, and I suspect it's a sign there may be other problems as well.
> I won't mince words: allowing the runtime to go EOL is unacceptable and indicates terrible maintainership.
I don't use Fedora but I do use OBS… on Mac, because OBS is hands-down the most popular application for streaming on any platform. It's crazy that OBS works great on Mac, works great on Windows, works great on Linux if using the OBS Flatpak, and when the Fedora-packaged-flatpak breaks and this Fedora guy starts saying that this is indicative that "there may be other problems".
If OBS isn't good enough for Fedora to ship a working version, then show me the streaming software that is.
Crazy how much drama happens in open projects like openAI.
AI generated SaaS app launching in Q2 and we’ll IPO later this year.
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.
> This is a formal request to remove all of our branding, including but not limited to, our name, our logo, any additional IP belonging to the OBS Project
Honestly it sounds very reasonable, if you want to fork it's fine, but don't have people report bugs upstream if you're introducing them.
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.