Taking the liberty to cross-post my involvement with Fedora Flatpaks; originally posted on Fedora Discourse.
4 years ago, I discovered Fedora Flatpaks, and developed a strong interest with the tech and approach behind it. After having a thorough understanding of it, I wrote two detailed articles about Fedora Flatpaks:
Mind you, I also designed the banners (just highlighting how much I cared about promoting it back then).
I also asked to open a Matrix room (2022/01/01), which was rejected:
discussion.fedoraproject.org/t…
As time went by, I started losing interest, because there wasn’t much progress with the project, and it was duplicating effort that could have otherwise heavily benefited Flathub and every party involved (GNOME, KDE, elementary, freedesktop.org, Endless Foundation, etc.), which would have benefited Fedora, too.
This realization led me to write “Where Fedora Linux Could Improve § Only Ship Unfiltered Flathub by Default”, which criticized the lack of progress with it, as well as addressing one of the “legal concerns” (2022/12/06):
tesk.page/2022/12/06/where-fed…
(Side note: I’ve also heard from Flathub folks that they received legal advice in regards to these issues.)
This led to some community members to react and start the Flatpak SIG project, to accelerate development — 2 days after my blog post (2022/12/08):
fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?…
Then, a Matrix room was (finally) created and publicly available (2022/12/10):
fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?…
By the way, I was never reached out or invited to join the SIG, despite putting in so much effort and time to accelerate development.
However, despite that, I still tried to participate in the project, and added myself to the SIG as well:
fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?…
Any of my suggestions then were either rejected with no proper explanation, shrugged off, or sent to /dev/null. And whenever I asked for source for obvious misinformation, it would be dismissed.
I tried to push Fedora Flatpaks in a direction that would have been less controversial and more productive by limiting its scope, which would also enable us to allocate more resources on other stuff. However, once again, I wasn’t really taken seriously; at least I personally don’t feel like so.
Eventually, I lost every last bit of interest and removed myself from the SIG (2023/02/20):
fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?…
All this to say, I tried really hard to keep my opinions to myself, and communicate diplomatically with them; I even wrote articles after doing several hours of researches in the span of weeks to show my interest, but I was treated extremely unfairly in return. So this naturally led me to one conclusion which I still hold today: they’re not looking for diplomacy; they just want to do whatever they want, even if it ends up upsetting/hurting people and projects’ image — I have the same sentiment with RPM packagers, too.
#Fedora #Flatpak #Flathub #Flatpaks
The Fedora Project is a great organization to gain experience no matter the team you are in. I am currently a part of the Fedora Websites & Apps team improving my technical writing, communication and design skills.
TheEvilSkeleton
