Red Hat Canonical Package Wars Claims Another Victim
TechRights.org's Dr. Roy Schestowitz blogged today that Red Hat was "bashing the media" for covering Canonical's Snap packaging. In related news, Matthias Klumpp has suspended development of Limba, a cross-platform package management system similar to Flatpak, in deference to Snap and Flatpak. On Snap, Christine Hall touched on a thought that needs to be reported as well. On the other side of town, Dominique Leuenberger shared a bit of Tumbleweed news and Mike Saunders posted on the progress of the Document Liberation Project.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz, from TechRights.org and Tuxmachines.org, today reacted to the brouhaha brewing between the Red Hat Fedora and Canonical Ubuntu groups for the top spot in cross-distribution software package delivery. He's upset because Fedora developers and managers seem to be attacking the press, of which he considers himself a part, over their coverage of Canonical's latest big announcement. Canonical announced earlier this week that their Snap packages will work on several other popular distributions. Apparently, Fedora developers were hoping Flatpak would the community choice for this technology and some lambasted the press for not covering Flatpak with the same enthusiam and frequency as Snap. Schestowitz said that the press and especially individual reporters should not be attacked for their coverage and bullied into covering something advantageously for one big project or another. He didn't just single out Red Hat/Fedora, he said Canonical has done the same thing. "They want the media to take sides and get upset that the media isn't telling the story the way they want it to," he said. "Red Hat will need to learn to respect the media or earn no respect in return. They need to work better with the media or have no media at all, except that which they pay for." He said he's almost stopped covering Linux stories because of this.
Christine Hall in covering the Snap announcement today said there may be a downside to all this cross-distribution package utopia. "Be on the lookout to see if this eventually brings crapware to Linux." By crapware I imagine she means adware, spyware, all kinds of extra software in the packages, and a desktop full of icons. When I read of Snaps I joked to myself, "Wonder when Linux will get a registry?" But spyware is inevitable I suppose.
Matthias Klumpp today said, sounding a bit sad, that he was going to slow development of his Limba package delivery system due to the competition from and apparent winners Snap and Flatpak. He said unlike those, his system was modular allowing libraries and toolkits to be used by other apps and updated independently - a superior system he thinks. Development will be slowed to the point he considers it a "research project" now.
All I can say is: Come on Slackware 14.2! Speaking of which, Slackware-current got more updates yesterday and today. GD got a security upgrade and PHP had a compile option added. ImageMagick was rebuilt for the new GD libraries. Come on, it smells done to me.
In other news:
* Document Liberation Project: progress so far in 2016