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General purpose computing (and particularly Free Software) is about empowering users, not developers. This quickly becomes important when interests misalign, fo

General purpose computing (and particularly Free Software) is about empowering users, not developers. This quickly becomes important when interests misalign, for example when developers want to push incompatible update to users and stop supporting previous version, or the upstream simply vanishes and stop providing security updates. Why is it OK for developers to "manage dependencies" (pin older versions of libraries) and somehow not for the end user agents (distros) to "manage" their dependencies (i.e. apps)? Moreover, why shouldn't we empower libraries' developers to push their versions as they want? They also have limited manpower and support capabilities.

microtonal 4y ago
General purpose computing (and particularly Free Software) is about empowering users, not developers. Empowering users is also making it easy to install what they want or need to install, not just what a distribution decides to offer. To give an example, many people need Slack for work, but distributions don't offer it, because it is non-free. This quickly becomes important when interests misalign, for example when developers want to push incompatible update to users and stop supporting previous version, Why should a distributor decide what my interests are? Also, this argument is kind of strange, if a developer is pushing an incompatible update or stops supporting a previous version, will the distribution continue to maintain the application? Not really. Usually, it just means that the application is frozen in time and you can only hope that security updates are applied. If the application happens to be (e.g.) in Ubuntu Universe, you are usually out of luck and you just get to keep a bunch of applications with known vulnerabilities.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Looking at the Slack .deb I see that there isn't even any info on what the license is for Slack, so distros couldn't distribute it even in their non-free archives. https://downloads.slack-edge.com/releases/linux/4.28.171/prod/x64/slack-desktop-4.28.171-amd64.deb https://downloads.slack-edge.com/releases/linux/4.28.171/pro... Not only that, but it contains ffmpeg and other LGPL stuff without distributing source code, which seems like an LGPL license violation to me.

microtonal 4y ago

General purpose computing (and particularly Free Software) is about empowering users, not developers. Empowering users is also making it easy to install what they want or need to install, not just what a distribution decides to offer. To give an example, many people need Slack for work, but distributions don't offer it, because it is non-free. This quickly becomes important when interests misalign, for example when developers want to push incompatible update to users and stop supporting previous version, Why should a distributor decide what my interests are? Also, this argument is kind of strange, if a developer is pushing an incompatible update or stops supporting a previous version, will the distribution continue to maintain the application? Not really. Usually, it just means that the application is frozen in time and you can only hope that security updates are applied. If the application happens to be (e.g.) in Ubuntu Universe, you are usually out of luck and you just get to keep a bunch of applications with known vulnerabilities.

pabs3 4y ago
Looking at the Slack .deb I see that there isn't even any info on what the license is for Slack, so distros couldn't distribute it even in their non-free archives. https://downloads.slack-edge.com/releases/linux/4.28.171/prod/x64/slack-desktop-4.28.171-amd64.deb https://downloads.slack-edge.com/releases/linux/4.28.171/pro... Not only that, but it contains ffmpeg and other LGPL stuff without distributing source code, which seems like an LGPL license violation to me.