After threats of legal action: OBS and Fedora reach deal in Flatpak dispute

The dispute between Fedora and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) has been resolved for now. According to OBS project manager Joel Bethke, he has spoken to Fedora boss Matthew Miller and developer Yaakov Selkowitz and has been able to work out a solution to the conflict. As a result, he withdrew the demand that Fedora remove all OBS intellectual property from the distribution or rename the Fedora flatpaks from OBS Studio. A legal dispute is therefore no longer to be expected.

Easier bug reports planned for Fedora flatpaks

Two possible solutions emerged from the discussions: In the short term, the Fedora flatpacks of OBS Studio are to receive an update containing Qt 6.8.2, which is intended to fix the regression errors that have occurred in the video recording and streaming software to date. In the medium to long term, it should be easier for Fedora users to see where they can report bugs that occur in software packages customized by Fedora. This is a difficult task for such a large project, says Bethke in his GitLab commentary. Nevertheless, he offers his support.

At the end of January, Joel Bethke had already complained about bugs in the Fedora flatpacks from OBS Studio. The maintainers of the Linux distribution provide open-source tools from third-party providers as their own flatpack packages and assign them the highest priority when installing from the Software Center. Because users often did not know that they were using customized programs, they blamed the OBS developers and reported the bugs to them. After weeks of failing to reach an agreement, he threatened a trademark lawsuit if Fedora continued to distribute its OBS Studio flatpack without appropriate labeling.

Own developers question Fedora flatpaks

According to Bethke, other OBS Studio bugs in the Fedora flatpaks have also been discussed. For example, there are problems with hardware acceleration so that the program has to fall back on a software rasterization with Mesa LLVM. Crashes can also occur if OBS Studio has to switch to the X11 display server. However, only a few users are affected by these issues. Bethke also sees a need for action in the integration of third-party plug-ins in Fedora flatpacks.

The conflict between OBS and Fedora also called into question the usefulness of Fedora flatpaks in the community, as the maintainers create their own software packages even if the developers of the tools themselves upload flatpaks to Flathub. Michael Cantanzaro, a participant in the Fedora project, also suggested that packages from Flathub should be given preference over in-house flatpacks during installation. Nothing is yet known about possible changes in this direction.

(sfe)