Some Fedora Flatpaks re-use Flathub app's manifests without crediting the authors

The Water Cooler
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Hey Jef, I really appreciate the thoughtful response over the situation. While I’m not a part of Flathub, I’m also grateful that you were considerate when raising concerns to them.

I would like to point out that hostility can take in various forms, and can be performed by a small set of individuals within a large group. I sincerely believe that you and the majority of people in the Fedora community are amiable and want the best for everyone — emphasis on “majority”. This is unfortunately not the case for everybody, especially not in my experience with the Fedora Flatpaks developer(s?)

I will take this as an opportunity to share my involvement with Fedora Flatpaks in the past, especially as a former supporter of it.

4 years ago, I discovered Fedora Flatpaks, and developed a strong interest with the tech and approach behind it. After having a thorough understanding of it, I wrote two detailed articles about Fedora Flatpaks:

Mind you, I also designed the banners (just highlighting how much I cared about promoting it back then).

I also asked to open a Matrix room (2022/01/01), which was rejected:

As time went by, I started losing interest, because there wasn’t much progress with the project, and it was duplicating effort that could have otherwise heavily benefited Flathub and every party involved (GNOME, KDE, elementary, freedesktop.org, Endless Foundation, etc.), which would have benefited Fedora, too.

This realization led me to write “Where Fedora Linux Could Improve § Only Ship Unfiltered Flathub by Default”, which criticized the lack of progress with it, as well as addressing one of the “legal concerns” (2022/12/06):

(Side note: I’ve also heard from Flathub folks that they received legal advice in regards to these issues.)

This led to some community members to react and start the Flatpak SIG project, to accelerate development — 2 days after my blog post (2022/12/08):

Then, a Matrix room was (finally) created and publicly available (2022/12/10):

By the way, I was never reached out or invited to join the SIG, despite putting in so much effort and time to accelerate development.

However, despite that, I still tried to participate in the project, and added myself to the SIG as well:

Any of my suggestions then were either rejected with no proper explanation, shrugged off, or sent to /dev/null. And whenever I asked for source for obvious misinformation, it would be dismissed.

I tried to push Fedora Flatpaks in a direction that would have been less controversial and more productive by limiting its scope, which would also enable us to allocate more resources on other stuff. However, once again, I wasn’t really taken seriously; at least I personally don’t feel like so.

Eventually, I lost every last bit of interest and removed myself from the SIG (2023/02/20):

All this to say, I tried really hard to keep my opinions to myself, and communicate diplomatically with them; I even wrote articles after doing several hours of researches in the span of weeks to show my interest, but I was treated extremely unfairly in return. So this naturally led me to one conclusion which I still hold today: they’re not looking for diplomacy; they just want to do whatever they want, even if it ends up upsetting/hurting people and projects’ image — I have the same sentiment with RPM packagers, too.

Once again, I really appreciate your amicable approach to raise legal concerns to Flathub, and I also want to publicly express my gratitude for raising legal concerns for Bottles too. Allow me to clarify that when I refer to “Fedora Flatpaks”, I don’t mean to rope you into it personally.

Fedora’s infrastructure is massive: “donating” these resources to Flathub would have opened up so many possibilities, especially with increasing the number of available runners that we can use to build our apps. Flathub would have probably benefited from the legal team as well. And all this would have in turn benefited Fedora and thousands of projects.

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