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That long list of letters…
CC-BY-NC-ND, also known as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s necessarily open for all uses. His license explicitly denied using his code in packages. People did it anyway.
The problem with that is anybody can create a package and push it to a registry for others to download. Those packages can be horribly broken or outdated. People then find his repository on GitHub and create an issue that some random person’s package that contains his code is broken and he should fix it. I fully understand not wanting to become the defacto maintainer for a bunch of random packages. Not that he could anyway. This is his comment about talking to their packagers and not him.
He already releases AppImage and Flatpak builds as well as instruction for compiling it yourself on Linux.
This sounds more like a warning that if this continues he’s going to drop support entirely. Sounds like fielding the erroneous support requests is eating a significant portion of his time.
Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s necessarily open for all uses. His license explicitly denied using his code in packages. People did it anyway.
There exists pkgbuilds for arch and previously packages of the older GPL builds.
A pkgbuild is just a recipe for each users computer do do the stuff needed to fetch and or build publicly available software. It is copyright the writer of the recipe not the owner of the software thus fetched. That is to say the owner of foobar can’t copyright the functional equivalent of a bash script which does git clone and make install foobar.
The older versions thereof are still available under the GPL and aren’t subject to being removed.
Neither of these are actually subject to the authors whims. He doesn’t own the pkgbuild and if he chooses to offer the file to users they can download it either by manually git cloning it or having a script do it.
Most open source code has some license dictating its use. Some are wide open, others are not. Some just don’t want you adding it to a commercial app and making money off it. Does that physically stop anybody? Of course not. The source is right there.
I’ve ran into libraries that are free and open for basically everybody. If you’re a company though…pay a license fee. Didn’t matter if the app you wanted to include it in is available to the public or not. Corporate use is not free.
That’s fine. He’s not the submitter nor maintainer of the AUR package. Clearly a bunch of Arch users are hitting him up about it though instead of the listed maintainer of the package when they have problems. I wouldn’t want to try and support something that I don’t have anything to do with either. He can’t repackage it…he can’t do anything. People kept telling him it’s broke. That would be super frustrating.
Where would it end though? There are thousands of Linux distros. He specifically called out Arch but I’m sure there are others in a similar situation. He gives you a way to run it on Linux that he’s willing to support. He’s a single person doing this in his spare time for free and you want him to make everybody happy. That’s unrealistic. He’s even called out that he doesn’t use Linux himself.
Every OS you support is a massive scale up in maintenance, testing, and time. Each new feature needs to be tested in each one. It’s a pain. Even automated you still need to maintain the vm’s or docker images you’re using to test with. What hardware is this being run on? Who’s paying for it? People will complain that it’s working on this version of the OS but not this other one. It’s a lot.
The overwhelming majority of Linux users are on 4 distros + derivatives. Debian Fedora Arch Suse not “thousands”
Where would what end? Most actually open source projects just publish releases to source and provide as much or as little support as they feel like. Slap a github issues page up and tell every user that you are only interested in dealing with bugs in the most recent version in whatever official channel you prefer eg provide appimage of releases and insist that users reproduce and document bug.
Time wasted mostly wont even bother to create a github account and if they do close issues if they can’t follow directions.
You do realize that following your own argument he could put up a GitHub issues page and say he only supports Windows and drop everything Linux related.
Indeed. If he changed the license to allow packaging the new version, at least all of those reports would be of the current version rather than the last GPL one.
Let the community in and use their time to contribute rather than locking it down as a one man project and then complaining about it.
Plus you can just make a flatpak or appimage and be done with it since those are distro agnostic. Wouldn’t be the first software where the flatpak is the only supported version and the AUR isn’t; see OBS
It should end at the dev putting out some sort of communication stating they’re not responsible for packaging, and to reach out to the package maintainers with issues installing from a package and not from the officially documented/supported installation procedure. That isn’t out of the norm at all for the open source community, and is one of the main reasons for releasing source code - to enable other people to build it and try to get it to work in whatever environment they want to.
That shouldn’t require a change to a much more restrictive license, and it certainly shouldn’t require implementing changes to your code that force it to fail on specific OSes (like what was recently added for Arch).
From his readme…
That long list of letters…
Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s necessarily open for all uses. His license explicitly denied using his code in packages. People did it anyway.
The problem with that is anybody can create a package and push it to a registry for others to download. Those packages can be horribly broken or outdated. People then find his repository on GitHub and create an issue that some random person’s package that contains his code is broken and he should fix it. I fully understand not wanting to become the defacto maintainer for a bunch of random packages. Not that he could anyway. This is his comment about talking to their packagers and not him.
He already releases AppImage and Flatpak builds as well as instruction for compiling it yourself on Linux.
This sounds more like a warning that if this continues he’s going to drop support entirely. Sounds like fielding the erroneous support requests is eating a significant portion of his time.
There exists pkgbuilds for arch and previously packages of the older GPL builds.
A pkgbuild is just a recipe for each users computer do do the stuff needed to fetch and or build publicly available software. It is copyright the writer of the recipe not the owner of the software thus fetched. That is to say the owner of foobar can’t copyright the functional equivalent of a bash script which does git clone and make install foobar.
The older versions thereof are still available under the GPL and aren’t subject to being removed.
Neither of these are actually subject to the authors whims. He doesn’t own the pkgbuild and if he chooses to offer the file to users they can download it either by manually git cloning it or having a script do it.
So no they didn’t “do it anyway”
So this is more like source available rather than open source…
Most open source code has some license dictating its use. Some are wide open, others are not. Some just don’t want you adding it to a commercial app and making money off it. Does that physically stop anybody? Of course not. The source is right there.
I’ve ran into libraries that are free and open for basically everybody. If you’re a company though…pay a license fee. Didn’t matter if the app you wanted to include it in is available to the public or not. Corporate use is not free.
Open Source has a specific meaning
Open but not free.
It’s not open source. The maintainer relicensed the project from GPL to the current source-available license last year.
The AUR package uses the last GPL release before the change and thus does the current license does not apply.
It is still open source. The attempt at relicensing isn’t legally valid. The consent of earlier contributors was not obtained.
That’s fine. He’s not the submitter nor maintainer of the AUR package. Clearly a bunch of Arch users are hitting him up about it though instead of the listed maintainer of the package when they have problems. I wouldn’t want to try and support something that I don’t have anything to do with either. He can’t repackage it…he can’t do anything. People kept telling him it’s broke. That would be super frustrating.
Seems like just repackaging it would solve the problem a lot easier than alienating a userbase- even if small
Where would it end though? There are thousands of Linux distros. He specifically called out Arch but I’m sure there are others in a similar situation. He gives you a way to run it on Linux that he’s willing to support. He’s a single person doing this in his spare time for free and you want him to make everybody happy. That’s unrealistic. He’s even called out that he doesn’t use Linux himself.
Every OS you support is a massive scale up in maintenance, testing, and time. Each new feature needs to be tested in each one. It’s a pain. Even automated you still need to maintain the vm’s or docker images you’re using to test with. What hardware is this being run on? Who’s paying for it? People will complain that it’s working on this version of the OS but not this other one. It’s a lot.
The overwhelming majority of Linux users are on 4 distros + derivatives. Debian Fedora Arch Suse not “thousands”
Where would what end? Most actually open source projects just publish releases to source and provide as much or as little support as they feel like. Slap a github issues page up and tell every user that you are only interested in dealing with bugs in the most recent version in whatever official channel you prefer eg provide appimage of releases and insist that users reproduce and document bug.
Time wasted mostly wont even bother to create a github account and if they do close issues if they can’t follow directions.
You do realize that following your own argument he could put up a GitHub issues page and say he only supports Windows and drop everything Linux related.
Indeed. If he changed the license to allow packaging the new version, at least all of those reports would be of the current version rather than the last GPL one.
Let the community in and use their time to contribute rather than locking it down as a one man project and then complaining about it.
Plus you can just make a flatpak or appimage and be done with it since those are distro agnostic. Wouldn’t be the first software where the flatpak is the only supported version and the AUR isn’t; see OBS
It should end at the dev putting out some sort of communication stating they’re not responsible for packaging, and to reach out to the package maintainers with issues installing from a package and not from the officially documented/supported installation procedure. That isn’t out of the norm at all for the open source community, and is one of the main reasons for releasing source code - to enable other people to build it and try to get it to work in whatever environment they want to.
That shouldn’t require a change to a much more restrictive license, and it certainly shouldn’t require implementing changes to your code that force it to fail on specific OSes (like what was recently added for Arch).