These projects have problems: Hyprland, Mozilla, Snap, AppImage, Manjaro...

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Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
00:56 Sponsor: SquareSpace
01:54 Mozilla
04:33 The Snap Store
05:49 AppImages
09:01 Manjaro
11:05 Source available & open source control
13:08 Hyprland
14:52 Parting Thoughts
15:26 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers

#OpenSource #controversy #linux #FOSS #linuxdrama

Mozilla has undeniably been an important influence on FOSS software. One thing that is often leveled against Mozilla is that they allegedly argued for internet censorship. In an infamous post, they said we needed more than de-platforming, as a bunch of people were kicked off popular social media sites for saying things that went against the terms of service.

Mozilla also has some other sticking points, notably their over reliance on Google's funding, and the fact that their executives are paid quite a lot of money for a non profit that is bleeding users and market share, at least in the browser space.

Another project that you're probably already aware of, is Snap, Ubuntu's solution for containerized apps. The main criticism levelled against snaps is its proprietary, centralized store.


Appimages are a relatively popular app distribution format, but all AppImages do rely on libfuse 2, which is deprecated and obsolete, and has been for a long while: its last version was in 2019, meaning it's been left for 5 years without any security update at all.

Other potential concerns about the AppImage projects are the fact that they're not sandboxed at all by default. There have also been some pretty harsh comments from one of AppImage's lead against apps that refuse to invest time to support the AppImage format.

Another project that has seen a fair few criticisms over the years is Manjaro. They've been known to package unstable versions of applications that weren't published as stable. Manjaro also has a pretty bad track record with security, failing to renew their certificates time and again.

Add to that the fact they partnered with a proprietary office suite and shipped it as the default, or the company behind Manjaro dropping their CFO when he refused to approve an expense for a new laptop, or their tool, Pamac, DDoSing the AUR by making too many requests, and you have a few issues that definitely tarnished the distro's reputation.

Another problematic issue we see more and more often is open source projects switching licenses to restrict what people can do, and open source projects being taken over entirely by certain companies.

A recent example is Red Hat, tacking on some license agreement to get access to the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, meaning that if you redistribute the source code you get access to as a customer, you won't be able to be a Red hat customer anymore.

Another example is Canonical, taking ownership of the LXD project, a project they had started, then gave to the Linux Containers Project, and then grabbed back again. They also removed maintainers that didn't work for Canonical but had been contributing to the project for a while.

Yet another example is Redis, moving to a source available license to try and stop giant cloud providers like AWS from making money off of Redis, but also limiting other user's rights in the process.

Finally, we have Hyprland.What some people have against Hyprland is mostly against the lead developer, not the project itself. He's been characterized as toxic, and the general community is often perceived as expressing hateful views in the form of what they call jokes. Stuff like endorsement of eugenics, calls for violence, or transphobia. The founder of Hyprland was recently banned from the Free Desktop.org community for this problematic behaviour, which went against the FDO's code of conduct. Hyprland's founder then basically doxxed the FDO member who banned him.