" This browser is created and maintained by the team behind Pale Moon..."
These guys https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86
How about not.
These guys https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86
How about not.
In this case, it is entirely possible that "You should revise your..." was the intended meaning. I don't think that "I will not be as educational next time" is bad if one is defending a license, especially since the license is pretty clearly written and distributed with the software. There shouldn't have been a need for the maintainer to explain the problem in the first place, but since they were kind enough to do so, I think it's entirely reasonable to say that the next interaction on this topic will not be amicable (to me, that sounds like getting lawyers involved).
Yes, it's very direct. Yes, it's probably a little too far toward outright dickishness. But that's their prerogative as the holders of the copyright, and they have to enforce it as they see fit.
Nintendo does the same stuff and people get annoyed by it, but at the end of the day, it's their right to protect their property.
> Hi, thanks for looking at packaging Pale Moon. Unfortunately the way you're doing it doesn't comply with our licence for these reasons ... Can you please make the following changes ... otherwise you won't have permission to distribute this build and we'll have to ask our lawyers to get involved if you did so.
While I agree things need to be clear and direct when licensing/legality is involved, jumping in with an air of arrogant authority "you will comply" at the start of an issue seems pretty ridiculous to me. It's also questionable that their licensing/terms are even applicable in this case, something else they refuse to acknowledge.
I guess overall, it doesn't matter all that much for users, but I certainly would not want to work with people that exhibit the kind of behavior they did in the thread.
One of the worst parts is that it never stopped. Not even an iota of self-analysis or introspection occurred in the thread. No apologies for misunderstandings or coming off harsh, just a persistent arrogance.
- Packagers are free volunteer labor that make your software available to the multitude of platforms your software could potentially run on. On a lot of platforms the work required to turn your source into a useful package is work your end users wont do if someone doesn't package it for them. If you want people to do this laborious chore you at least speak to them kindly. After all they only get your and your users thanks for their work.
- Not being able to work without a very specific set of libraries and versions isn't necessarily broken but not being able to and not being able to express that in the build is highly suggestive that it is a huge pile of hacks. Reading their own words thereafter it is indeed a huge pile of hacks.
- The repo is a staging area for development of instructions to build software not a means to distribute software to end users. The makefile is a textual description of steps to build the software and other required libraries. On the one hand its dubious that it is copyrightable on the other if it is then copyright would lie with the github user developing openbsd. Further almost all of the code to be built strictly speaking belongs to the mozilla foundation. They are in fact asserting their trademark as a way to try to block people distributing machine readable instructions for building mozillas software.
Trademark exists to keep merchants from distributing confusingly branded goods. This is actually machine instructions for building their actual goods from their actual sources with settings they don't approve of.
To distribute the combined work would require rebranding. To distribute instructions to build their sources no more requires permission than saying the word palemoon here.
- They do not possess the wherewithal to pursue legal action especially legal action that would cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect imaginary rights that they misunderstand. They have no revenue to speak of. Anyone can send a strongly worded letter and write cease and desist along the top in bold all caps printing. It doesn't make them a credible threat. When anyone can see the threat has no teeth it makes you look poor to make it.
- It's incredibly predictable that someone with no investment or gain in helping you distribute your software will simply stop helping you if you threaten them with lawyers or talk shit. Since this is a negative outcome why do it? 10 seconds to pause and speak respectfully would be such a small investment.
- They never realized their error and acknowledged their mistake.
- Normal behavior for people that build your software in an unapproved way is to refuse to support users using unapproved configuration. This is a social norm.
- Openbsd devs seem to have had good reason for their configuration choices that are perfectly reasonable.
Do we need 7 more bullet points?
However, you seem to be conflating arguments about the quality of their software and whether or not they should/shouldn't enforce their license. It's entirely possible that they wanted that repo to stop distributing their software.
For example-- where is the introductory email from the would-have-been packager to upstream saying,
"Hello, I'm so-and-so. I'd like to take a stab at packaging Pale Moon for so-and-so. Any docs or issues I should take into consideration before beginning? Sincerely, Obvious First Step"
Especially considering Pale Moon is probably in that category of "top 20 most complex packages" for their system.
I'll give another example of similar non-existent communication with upstream that ended up wasting my time as a Debian user:
"Dear Firefox, Hi. It's the firefox-esr packaging team from Debian. Our current package for it is about to go EOL. Since our release schedule is slow and our security policy doesn't scale, we make an exception for Firefox by backporting the new ESR version in its entirety. Anything special we should know about major version 60? We know that some of the archs we support are considered tier 3 archs by Firefox, and we'd hate for an upgrade on our stable release to break FF completely for lots of users who run Debian Stretch on arm devices, for example. Especially given that nobody can build with debug symbols on some of our supported archs, making it difficult for them to adequately report the bug to you."
I upgraded to Buster because of this. I.e., Firefox's "ESR" holds more meaning for me than Debian's "stable" does.
Linus was arrogant, condescending and abusive in his emails. Those guys were arrogant and condescending. Being as bad as Linus when dealing with other people is really not something worth striving for and not something worth defending.