Summary
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Linux Mint includes an outdated GNOME Calendar but directs users to the top level, resulting in confusing bug reports.
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Mint refused to rebrand/remove uplinks and closed the ticket, showing uncooperative downlink behavior.
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Upstream developers face a lose-lose situation: being polite gets in the way of solutions, being tough gets ignored, and defending the work can turn them into villains.
We, and many Linux veterans, often recommend Linux Mint as the best distribution for newcomers. However, it seems that not everyone holds it in such high regard, as one GNOME Calendar developer has called it a “hostile current” for not cooperating with them.
GNOME Calendar Developer Says Linux Mint Isn’t Playing Ball
It’s causing a lot of problems
How he saw it LinuxiacGNOME Calendar developer, Hari Rana, expressed their frustrations about how Linux Mint was handling their application. While GNOME Calendar has received updates for some time now, Rana says that the Linux Mint developers have not updated it on their part.
This is all well and good, but the problem is that Linux Mint tells users to contact the GNOME Calendar developers if something goes wrong. As such, GNOME Calendar maintainers are receiving confusing bug reports because the version on Linux Mint is quite outdated now.
To help alleviate the problem, Rana claims that they contacted Linux Mint and asked them to remove any links to the GNOME Calendar developers and rename the app. After some back and forth, Linux Mint was uncooperative and blocked the ticket.
Rana claims that interactions like this are a lose-lose situation:
Once they start packaging your software, they immediately burn your bridges implicitly. To show that they are “good”, they just pretend to care about the problem and keep proposing “solutions” that 1. have nothing to do with the underlying problem and 2. impose a significantly greater burden on upstream without putting in the same amount of effort themselves.
Rana says cases like this don’t often reach the public because the people who maintain these projects are usually independent developers who end up exhausted by the problems and abandon the project altogether.
Rana completes his blog post by saying that upstream developers find themselves in a lose-lose situation when handling hostile downstreams. If the developer acts nice, you are put on a nearly eternal waiting list to solve your problem. If the developer gets frustrated and acts rudely, downstream people will use that as an excuse to ignore the problem. Worse still, if an upstream intervenes legally to protect both their work and their maintainers, they risk being perceived as “the Nintendo of free software” and villains.
