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OpenSUSE package maintainer removes Bottles’ donation button with "dont-support.patch" file
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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I read the drama in Twitter and PR.
While Bottles maintainer does not do a great job to politely prove the point of the patch to disable Bottles outside of sandboxed environments, he is not required to be a diplomat as mainter (though it would be better, of course) and Bottles decision makes total sense - they asked to not package their software long ago as they drown in bugs and supporting non predictable environment with unknown dependencies creates too many problems for them. I can understand that, development is hard as it is, unpredictability of environment multiplies this complexity.
They are maintainers and they do what they can to support the project, so removing donate button while packaging software done by others (who asked not to do it) is a childish move. Yes it's FOSS, but morally it sounds a bit wrong.
We ask too much of mainters when it comes to soft skills, not all of us got these, but also not all of us are FOSS maintainers. And I think we should stop asking everyone to possess all skills in the world and react on someone's rudeness as we are 5 (not saying we shouldn't improve).
I don't know about morality, but my view is that it's part of the deal with free software: users can do what they want with it. If you willingly make your software free, that's what you signed up for. In return, the devs have no obligations to listen to users or do anything they don't want. If they only want to fix bugs in the flatpak, fine, that's their choice. It's their software, we're all free to work on or use it as we want.
TBH I don't have strong opinion where the boundaries of FOSS are. But I can understand their will to minimize effort where you see it fits as an engineer. If they think they lack of manpower to do something, it's their vision as they put work towards it. We can help if we like, agree, disagree or ignore. Does not make sense to blame them though, that was the point of my first comment.
This is a legit non-issue for so many other projects. What makes bottles special?
It was described in open letter if I recall correctly, bottles is as special as any other project is to any other project, it depends on perspective. But beyond technical details - It is their decision as maintainers, you do not agree with it, I can understand it.