from Hacker News

The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action

by TheFreim on 2/13/25, 11:52 PM with 216 comments

  • by rincebrain on 2/14/25, 1:01 AM

    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.

    [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.)

  • by kattagarian on 2/14/25, 12:16 AM

    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?

  • by diego_sandoval on 2/14/25, 12:56 AM

    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.

  • by uneekname on 2/14/25, 3:00 AM

    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.

  • by stolen_biscuit on 2/14/25, 12:19 AM

    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

  • by wilg on 2/14/25, 12:43 AM

    Lots of Linux-related drama on HN lately. Maybe someone should offer free conflict resolution classes for libre software maintainers.

  • by mappu on 2/14/25, 1:21 AM

    There is some additional commentary/background in the OSNews reporting: https://www.osnews.com/story/141723/fedora-should-not-push-i...

  • by akerl_ on 2/14/25, 12:38 AM

    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.

  • by halifaxbeard on 2/14/25, 1:22 AM

    more surprising is there's no way for them to delete it from the flatpak registry

    https://pagure.io/releng/issue/12586#comment-955583

  • by ben0x539 on 2/14/25, 5:22 AM

    What's the term for having to choose between an deprecated/EOL version or an unstable/regressed version? It seems like it comes up over and over again.

  • by poulpy123 on 2/14/25, 7:15 AM

    The state of software distribution on Linux has always been catastrophic and it's an incredible miracle that Linux was able to enjoy the success it had despite this

  • by gbraad on 2/14/25, 1:59 AM

    The package was already updated before this post was made:

    https://src.fedoraproject.org/flatpaks/obs-studio/history/co...

    which reads:

    ``` end-of-life: 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. ```

  • by boredatoms on 2/14/25, 12:08 AM

    Linux distributions have often whitelabeled software that make trademark threats

  • by countWSS on 2/14/25, 8:00 AM

    There is an easy trick to prevent this from happening:: for every library update that you have decided to use, pick the newest, most cutting edge feature and integrate it so deep the project maintainers will have to rewrite half the code for it to function in any version below the current...(and thats why you can't have nice things in old linuxes without recompiling it manually)

  • by gkbrk on 2/14/25, 7:49 AM

    Their Flatpak repository looks cool, just added it to my own non-Fedora system to check it out.

      flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists fedora oci+https://registry.fedoraproject.org

  • by daurentius523 on 2/14/25, 5:19 PM

    I find it quite funny that OBS thinks that fedora isn't giving reasonable response when they (OBS) blocked any responses to issue of them still using EOL Qt 6.6 - since December.

  • by vaxman on 2/14/25, 6:18 PM

    A non-profit open source project is threatening IBM with legal action.

    https://youtu.be/IHTaMMyK274

  • by hammerhorn on 2/16/25, 5:23 PM

    People who are not okay with being forked should reconsider their decision to be use the GPL.

  • by attentionmech on 2/14/25, 2:02 AM

    why don't they just block the obs project and let users install it in unofficial manner while removing themselves as middleman? I mean, they have certain let's say guidelines but why go about enforcing them in this weird manner.

  • by tuananh on 2/14/25, 12:14 AM

    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.

  • by Sincere6066 on 2/18/25, 3:59 PM

    Why is OBS pushing flatpak?

  • by johnea on 2/14/25, 12:53 AM

    Moral of the story: Don't use flatpack...

  • by ajross on 2/14/25, 12:16 AM

    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 the FlatPak) and get those posted to HN?

    Lots of steam, no meat. If this did go to a lawyer, the first question would be "Well, did you try to work with them?" Seemingly the answer is no. Or if it's "yes", it's somewhere back in the history of a pre-existing conflict.

    This isn't the first conflict between an upstream and a distro about packaging process and it won't be the last. By definition the feature we users want from the distros is that they are making opinionated choices about how to present the world of software to us.

  • by guelo on 2/14/25, 12:46 AM

    Centralized App stores are bad enough, but App Stores tied to each OS release and the random whims of distro maintainers is insane. It holds back the whole ecosystem.