Fedora threatened with legal action from OBS Studio due to their Flatpak packaging

I feel like OP missed an opportunity to title this post “Fedora Flatpaks Fall Flat”

Great article, BTW

Great article, BTW

I disagree, the headline is clickbaity and implies that there is some ongoing conflict. The fact that the Fedora flatpak package maintainer pushed an update marking it EOL, with "The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build." in the end-of-life metadata field the day before this article was written is not mentioned until the second-to-last sentence of it. (And the OBS maintainer has since said "For the moment, the EOL notice is sufficient enough to distance ourselves from the package that a full rebrand is not necessary at this time, as we would rather you focus efforts on the long-term goal and understand what that is.")

The article also doesn't answer lots of questions such as:

Why is the official OBS flatpak using an EOL'd runtime?

Why did Fedora bother to maintain both their own flatpak and an RPM package of OBS?

What (and why) are the problems (or missing functionality) in the Fedora Flatpak, anyway? (there is some discussion of that here... but it's still not clear to me)

What is the expected user experience going to be for users who have the Fedora flatpak installed, now that it is marked EOL? Will it be obvious to them that they can/should use the flathub version, or will the EOL'd package in the Fedora flatpak repo continue to "outweigh" it?

Note again that OBS's official flathub flatpak is also marked EOL currently, due to depending on an EOL runtime. Also, from the discussion here it is clear that simply removing the package (as the OBS dev actually requested) instead of marking it EOL (as they did) would leave current users continuing to use it and unwittingly missing all future updates. (I think that may also be the outcome of marking it EOL too? it seems like flatpak maybe needs to get some way to signal to users that they should uninstall an EOL package at update time, and/or inform them of a different package which replaces one they have installed.)

TLDR: this is all a mess, but, contrary to what the article might lead people to believe, the OBS devs and Fedora devs appear to be working together in good faith to do the best thing for their users. The legal threat (which was just in an issue comment, not sent formally by lawyers) was only made because Fedora was initially non-responsive, but they became responsive prior to this article being written.
I can confirm, I really missed the opportunity
- You can edit the title...

The issue is that they are pushing their own version of flatpaks, some of which are broken, instead of contributing to flat hub and making that the default.

That wouldn’t work. Flathub and Fedora Flatpaks have different goals.

Fedora Flatpaks must meet legal requirement set by Fedora, so no proprietary or patented software.

Flathub also encourages upstream to maintain their packages. But upstream may not meet the security requirements set by Fedora. Fedora has much stricter packaging guidelines which don’t permit vendored dependencies.
- That honestly doesn't sound like a bad mission, but it seems like there's a couple other requirements they should impose on their mission and then there wouldn't be any controversy.
  
  They should require that their package works as well as the upstream, and, in the even that it doesn't, they need to be very blatant and open that this is a downstream package, and support for it will only be provided by Fedora Flatpaks, and that you may have better results with the official packages.
  
  The primary issues in this case is that it doesn't work, and it's not been clear to users who to ask for help.
I'm sorry, but you've completely missed either the point, or how it works.

Flathub is really the problem here for not properly verifying package owners/maintainers and allowing them to moderate other versions of their work.

There honestly just needs to finally be a way to sort official packages from community packages. Right now it's a mess. Fedora should just take theirs down.
- Confidentally incorrect.
  
  Flathub has nothing to do with this

Ah I'm glad to see the situation seems to have cooled a little.

See this comment and the three following, as well as this one and the two following. I think they can now work it out between the projects reasonably.

PS: This more fundamental proposal for Fedora Workstation that started from the OBS packaging issue is also interesting to read. It seems they are looking to make more limited / focused use of their own Flatpak remote in the future since some old assumptions regarding Flatpaks and Flathub don't hold so well anymore.

What is the lesson we can learn here as stated by the author of the post?

A messy situation but hopefully one some lessons can be learned from.

There is no info why packaging failed. I can't draw any obvious lesson from this post

The lesson is that Fedora Flatpak Repo needs to fuck off. It's an anti-pattern to have an obscure flatpak repo with software that is packaged differently from everything else.

The entire point of flatpaks was to have a universal packaging format that upstream devs could make themselves, and Fedora is completely undermining it.
- And Fedora Flatpaks are universal, they work on any distros.
  
  Flatpak by design allows you to install Flatpaks from multiple stores. The fact that snap only allows one store is a common criticism of snap.
  
  Fedora Flatpaks were created because Fedora has strict guidelines for packages. They must be FOSS, they must not included patented software, and they need to be secure.
  
  Flathub allows proprietary and patented software, so not all Flathub packages could be preinstalled. And if a Flathub package was preinstalled, it could add proprietary or patented bits without Fedora having a say.
  
  Flathub packages are also allowed to use EOL runtimes and include vendored dependencies that have security issues. Fedora does not want this. Fedora Flatpaks are built entirely from Fedora RPMs so they get security updates from Fedora repos.
- Why don't you like fedora flatpaks?
  
  Among other reasons, Fedora ensure that apps get a flatpak. Imagine there was no official flatpak, fedora would've made one. Just like fedora ensures that there are native ways to install it via dnf. On atomic distros, you want to use flatpaks very often. Hence it makes sense to package apps via flatpak.
  
  Fedora ensures that there is not additional code in the app kind of like fdroid on phones.
  
  Anyone can make flatpaks, not just the main dev.

Obviously, the best solution is that the gets settled out-of-court. However, Fedora has had a long time to listen to the OBS devs' request to stop packaging broken software, so maybe they won't listen to reason.

Fedora needs to get their heads out of their asses and kill the Fedora Flatpak repo.

Is there any merit to the claim OBS is using an end-of-life (EOL) runtime and that this is a very bad thing for security?

OBS continued using the EOL runtime because of Qt regressions introduced in the updated KDE runtime. The OBS team decided the security risk of sticking to the EOL runtime was small, so they didn't update.

But that still does mean that users were no longer receiving security updates. Ideally, OBS should have moved to the standard Freedesktop runtime and vendored in the older Qt dependency. That way, the they would still be receiving security updates for everything in the Freedesktop runtime. Then once the regressions were fixed, they could move to the updated KDE runtime and remove the vendored Qt dependency.

Overall, the risk OBS had was small. But it demonstrates a larger issue with Flathub, which is that they don't take security as seriously as Fedora. There are hundreds of flatpaks in Flathub that haven't been updated in years, using EOL runtimes and vendored dependencies that get no updates.
- It's important to acknowledge that nothing is completely secure.
  
  I didn't know this was an issue for OBS because I'm not experiencing any problems nor am I seeing anyone else.
I think you might find this comment by one of the OBS upstream devs interesting:

https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-955899
- Fedora's opinion seems to be that upgrading is always the right choice, which we disagree with.
  
  Ugh, I'm glad people are willing to fight back against these kinds of assertions.
  
  Regardless of who is right, facilitating and encouraging this kind of discourse is how we end up with better software for everyone.
- thanks!

Totally forget that I still was in fedora's flatpak repo until the news dropped. Took the opportunity to remove and replace it with flathub.

inb4 Iceweasel

lol. so I guess fedora is pushing flatpacks now? I know Ubuntu was pushing snap, so I guess fedora followed suite with a different standard. yay.

thankfully arch isn't getting into this nonsense

Worse than that, the issue the article states isn't that it's a flat pack, it's that fedora is pushing their rebuilt flat pack of obs that's buggy instead of the official obs one from flat hub that works, and then the obs project is getting bug reports for a third party distribution that's broken.

Because fedora isn't just pushing flat packs, they're pushing made by fedora versions of them instead of the official builds from the maintainers.
- Great explanation.
  
  If I were the OBS devs, I'd make a clear indication on their website when reporting bugs that the fedora version of OBS is unsupported for, well, the reasons they don't support it.
  
  It seems way more effective than threatening legal repercussions.
It doesn't mean they are pushing flatpaks, but rather for whatever reason they decided to package their own flatpaks.

Flatpak can support different repos, so of course fedora can host its own. The strange bit is why bother repackaging and hosting software that is already packaged by the project itself on flathub?

One argument might me the security risk of poorly packaged flatpaks relying on eol of dependencies. Fedora may feel it is better to have a version that it packages in line with what it packages in its own repos?

I have some sympathy for that position. But it makes sense that it is annoying OBS when it is causing confusion if its a broken or poorly built repackags, and worse it sounds like things got very petty fast. I think OBS's request that fedora flag this up as being different from the flathub version wasn't unreasonable - but not sure what went down for it to get to thepoint of threatening legal action under misuse of the branding.

Fedora probably should make it clearer to its users what the Fedora Flatpak repo is for.
- Fedora already has two “warnings” when it comes to their own packages.
  
  First, Gnome Software shows a verified badge for all Flatpaks that are maintained by upstream. The Fedora Flatpak does not have this badge.
  
  Second, when installing a Fedora Flatpak, the label “Fedora Flatpak” shows right under the install button
  
  Sure, this isn’t perfect. Non-technical users may not understand what these mean. But it’s not like Fedora is intentionally trying to mislead users.
Having distro-specific flatpaks really seems to be defeating the whole purpose
- It’s not distro specific. Fedora Flatpaks are just built from Fedora RPMs, but they work on all distros.
  
  If you care about FOSS spirit, security, and a higher packaging standard, then Fedora Flatpaks may be of interest.
  
  If you want a package that just works, then Flathub may be of interest. But those packages may be using EOL runtimes and may include vendored dependencies that have security issues.
Fedora has always been one of the flatpak friendly distros.

No, it’s not like snap. Fedora is not removing RPMs and replacing them with flatpaks. It just defaults to flatpaks. Fedora Flatpaks are built entirely from existing RPMs.
thankfully arch isn’t getting into this nonsense

🙌
Ubuntu was pushing snap,

interesting... ive not seen anything regarding snaps in mint... flatpak is the other option in the software manager
- Mint explicitly goes out of its way to disable snap in favour of flatpaks.
  
  https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html
- The Mint team removed snap intentionally and explain their reasons here: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906
- And that's the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!
  
  Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it's "fine" but it doesn't solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.