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Comment by borland | Hacker News Reader

Good on them. Software vendors should be able to excercise some control over how their software is distributed.

Also, I find any system where someone else tries to "add value" by wrapping or aggregating a bunch of pre-existing stuff without asking for permission from the pre-existing owners to be distasteful and somewhat rude.

What's the bet that Chocolately obtained prior permission from Telerik, Mozilla, Google or any other of the software vendors to redistribute their packages? It seems unlikely

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If software vendors are making publically available a url from which to download packages, then as far as I'm concerned they can pound sand. What does it matter if I fetch its contents via a shell script or a browser?

Providing a script to download binaries from the site is a completely different thing from re-hosting and redistributing binaries without permission. I don't use chocolatey and have no idea what the background is to this story, so don't take this as a defense of their actions.

> If software vendors are making publically available a url from which to download packages, then as far as I'm concerned they can pound sand. What does it matter if I fetch its contents via a shell script or a browser?

Is there any point arguing that? If Chocolatey refused, then Telerik would remove the public download. If Telerik insists on asking for email addresses or showing a TOS before allowing a download, then that's what they're going to do.

You're technically correct, but it's not a technical issue.

Exactly. If they want to require you to enter information before downloading, then create temporary download links. Problem solved.

What is your take on me posting the following on my blog:

"wget https://www.telerik.com/docs/default-source/fiddler/fiddlers... && fiddlersetup.exe"

redistribute their packages

Chocolately wasn't redistributing the Fiddler packages[0].

[0] - https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey-coreteampackages/bl...

Or in PowerShell (if I’ve the syntax right...typing this on an iPhone)

   ((https://www.telerik.com/docs/default-source/fiddler/fiddlersetup.exe).Content >fiddlersetup.exe) -and (fiddlersetup.exe)

Do you feel the same way about Linux distros? For example, should Debian be asking permission from each package before they create a package for it?

That's a bad example: Debian only packages GPL (or compatible) code, and by releasing something as GPL you are giving certain rights to anyone that receives it, including the right to package it. Put another way, Debian already does get permission before packaging anything (they just don't need to ask).

I'm specifically addressing the comment I replied to, which commented on whether or not Chocolately asked for permission from several companies, including Telerik but also Mozilla, whose software is notably FOSS

Well, there is a difference. Those are FOSS packages being rebuilt and redistributed under the terms that they were licensed under.

AFAIK, Fiddler is not FOSS.

The comment I'm responding to called out "What's the bet that Chocolately obtained prior permission from Telerik, Mozilla, Google or any other of the software vendors to redistribute their packages?"

I'm of the opinion that Telerik has the right to license their software as they see fit, including making it not available for packaging in Chocolatey, and legal precedent makes it much more dubious whether or not the existence of an accessible URL makes it legally OK for Chocolatey to package it than I think most people here are acknowledging.

That said, the commenter I replied to also called out Mozilla, and as far as I'm aware, the software of theirs that folks package is FOSS

makes it legally OK for Chocolatey to package it than I think most people here are acknowledging.

Chocolately never distributed Fiddler packages. This is just a basic misunderstanding of how Chocolately works.

I feel like this is the first half of a comment. If you believe I misunderstand how Chocolatey works, the interesting bit isn't telling me I'm mistaken, it's correcting my mistake by pointing out that Chocolatey doesn't actually copy and redistribute the package, it provides users with scripting sufficient that their local machine downloads the package from the origin service.

But in practice, I'm aware of how Chocolatey works, and figured I could get away with pointing out that the US legal system has previously considered access of remote systems to be a crime even in cases of publicly exposed endpoints without having to do a longwinded explanation of the role of Chocolatey vs the end user running Chocolatey's provided scripts.

Ok, what do you feel about older Broadcom drivers for Linux?

Those drivers are not open source, and did not allow for distribution. So Linux distributions included scripts to download from the public sources (provided by Broadcom), and run the install. The only software "distributed" by the OS provider, was a simple download script (probably less than a couple dozen lines).

If you are Ok with that, then note that that is what Chocolately does. I linked to the actual source code of the Chocolately package in another comment if you want to see what it does.

I think that my distribution (Fedora) doesn't do that with the Broadcom drivers, at least in the official distribution. I don't really think that is a great practice for an official distribution.

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