For those who aren’t aware, recently OBS was added to Fedora Flatpaks. OBS reported that the package was broken. The Fedora Flatpak maintainer didn’t want to remove it, which eventually led to OBS threatening legal action.

Side note: the issues with the Fedora Flatpak are twofold. Only official builds of OBS get certain features. The other issue is Fedora’s stance on proprietary and patented software limits what they can include. In my testing, the Fedora Flatpak worked fine for my basic screen recording use case.

The part which confuses me is how people are reacting to this. People seem to support the fact that this escalated to threatening legal action.

But at the same time, what Fedora is doing is really no different to what all other distros are doing. Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and OBS Studio all also package unofficial versions that lack features because they don’t have access to the OBS API key.

I get preferring getting your packages from upstream. I can get not liking Fedora Flatpaks. But supporting legal action against a FOSS project for providing a downstream package, even if it’s a “bad” one? That’s just crazy to me.

It’s gets even funnnier (in a sad way) because a few years ago Red Hat donated $10k to OBS after they made the Flathub package official. And now OBS is threatening legal action against Fedora for providing an unofficial flatpak.