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It's crazy the amount of power maintainers hold over someone else's software. This reminds me of the time when Fedora maintainers disabled GLES1 support in Mesa because "nobody should be using it anymore (there are newer OpenGL versions)", disregarding the fact that GLES1 was well and fully maintained upstream, and was and is still the only option on many devices.

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>power maintainers hold over someone else's software

There's some subtle assumptions about ownership in this comment that aren't accurate, insofar as free and open source software is concerned.

FOSS software is not "someone else's" software. They may own the trade mark, but by releasing the software under a FOSS licence, they lose the right to control the direction the software may take. I'm free to copy it, edit it, and redistribute it as I see fit. So are you. So is Debian.

That's besides the point. You can do whatever with the software, but it gets muddy when you then release it under the same name as the original. That name may not be trademarked, but it is still not yours to use.

This simply is irrelevant. A FOSS licence fully permits what Debian has done here. So, that is beside the point.

Not even comparable. Debian users can choose between the stripped and full version of Keepassxc, unlike the MESA example above.

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