Might be. The list is long and probably a lot of work. Feeling like you don’t get the recognition you’d want can certainly burn you out over time…
Good reply, I agree.
He’s just the maintainer of the PPA not the owner or copyright holder of the projects he has created a PPA around, it’s not like the projects have become closed. Now some people just can’t take advantage of his time/effort to make the latest version of the software nicely packaged up. They are free to go get the latest source and compile/package it themselves. I guess his thinking is that once some folk realise how much work that can be they will sponsor a PPA to get it done for them again.
Remember the ‘Free’ in Free & Open Source isn’t about cost, it’s about liberty.
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I’m gonna make some assumptions, but here’s my take.
Licensing & Distribution
This isn’t really about licensing at all. He is essentially a third party software distributor (using launchpad’s infrastructure?). He works to build & package software, he has no control over the license of said software.
Support & Time
but when they make a request will absolutely not pay for someone else's time
Sounds like he’s had instances where [email protected] contact him and ask for things, probably to apply patches to a package or to package a project he hasn’t packaged yet. This could simply be his way of saying: stop wasting my time & go somewhere else.
Money
The other possibility I see is that he has access to download logs and noticed a company that he sees as a bad actor using his packages for malware, adware etc. This is pure speculation on my part.
or indirectly through contributions to an upstream project
So not a pure money grab, just show that you are supporting the projects you use to get access to the repositories.
If he’s actually hosting the repositories himself… That could be quite expensive depending on the hardware/bandwidth requirements. He may simply be unable to afford the ongoing costs.
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This. I have seen lots of websites that host and distribute peoples 3D files allow for people to use a more restrictive creative commons license on their project, thus disallowing for the project to be used commercially.
Also, I don’t really know what this does. Wouldn’t people just manually compile the code? Especially a big company or something. Even the little guys. And someone can come out and do exactly what he did if they have the time. Because nothing that he does is proprietary.
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Very likely
Sounds like it to me. This may be his way to tell everyone to stop consider how much work they get done for free.
With “let’s outsource everything” still beeing the sentence to win in management, I doubt they care. Collect free stuff, rake in massive profit, repeat.
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This may be one of those “unpopular opinions”…
I’m looking at the package list and thinking to myself: How much work was it to maintain? Why? Could it have been done more easily or more cheaply in terms of overall cost of effort?
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So this a case of;
I don’t get paid for the work I don’t have to do
Okay then stop doing it, don’t keep doing it and bitch about it. Want people to care then they will miss it when it is gone.
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I look at the list and think: Woah, one man not a team?
Ansible for example is a big deal.
That’s why I re-wrote my original post- he must have only done a wrapper/conversion, rather than the whole original software.
So he is working (for free) off others works too, but he is not charging (if legit)
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I’m kind of guessing that there’s software similar to Ansible out there in terms of dependencies and that you can setup scripts to keep building packages in a similar way using some kind of qemu mechanism launched by a cron; also such that once package building fails once in a blue moon you’re notified, and can probably more or less easily fix the issue… or better yet just notify the Ansible authors.
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Maintainer: I want software to be free!
Also Maintainer: no, not that sort of free!
What a pillock. I mean his stuff, his prerogative, but all he’s really done is reduce public free access to this stuff and in turn hurt free software.
Oh, and hurt the reputation of free software/free repositories - if someone can do this to the source of my software, why would i trust my digital life to it? Screw that, i’ll pay someone for that.
Nice foot shot buddy!
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Rely on third party PPAs at your own risk I guess.
I’m a little confused why anyone would need his PPAs for things like ansible, git, openjdk, etc… or am I missing something?
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Possibly only old versions of the software are distributed by default or some similar reason.
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Yeah, that’s the only explanation I could think of as well. Still, it’s pretty niche. Idk if I’d consider a PPA the same as I would actual software. Basically, he was hosting some data for free and now he’s not…
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It’s not even him, it’s canonical that is paying for hosting I think since it is on launchpad.
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Oh interesting… I didn’t realize Canonical hosted PPAs outside of mainline Ubuntu.
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