This is not a good trend
This is not a good trend
Posted Mar 3, 2025 14:46 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)In reply to: This is not a good trend by PastyAndroid
Parent article: Fedora discusses Flatpak priorities
This is not how users behave. They see an error message or experience an issue, they search it on Google which will find the original author of the software and not the distribution. Especially if that error message or issue was seen in the Windows or Mac OS versions too. Users don't want to use distributions (or even operating systems for that matter), they want to use a specific set of applications (sometimes with specific versions).
Posted Mar 3, 2025 16:23 UTC (Mon)
by PastyAndroid (subscriber, #168019)
[Link]
The issue we're discussing here is where Fedora compiled the application with different versions of software than the application author did, this caused issues with the software. That is a distribution specific issue and would apply in this case and thus, this belongs as a report for the distribution and not the original authors. Such issues should always be first reported to the distribution, not the authors.
The line can get a little blurry as to who is responsible from a users perspective and so, I suggested reporting all issues to the distribution first as a matter of course, the distribution can help guide the user as to whether it's a distribution specific issue or an upstream issue - perhaps the package maintainer or someone on behalf of the distribution could open the upstream bug report as they are in a much better position to provide the necessary information (think debugging and otherwise).
In any case, authors who do not wish to deal with such potential issues can use flathub or other official distribution methods and avoid their packages being redistributed in a distribution using their trademark rights to refuse it. Thus, any issues are solely on the original authors as they control the whole chain in that case.
Overall the key would be to ensure users are properly guided in how to report their problems, removing any ambiguity or need to question it. The easier you make this for users, the better.
We really do not want to be an 'open community' that sues each other using trademark rights when we are unhappy with something. That doesn't sound very open at all. Instead we should aim to solve the underlying issues as opposed to putting a band-aid on issues or ignoring them.
This is not a good trend
