Thoughts on creating packages and breaking them for profit?

Question

I've come across 2 PPAs today which are or have been broken in hopes of making money. In one case, some dependencies have been set as private to break the main packages (like ffmpeg5). This is causing some open source project builds to fail (when these relied on these PPAs) and it makes a bunch of documentation useless.2 examples:- https://launchpad.net/~savoury1 - currently broken packages- https://web.archive.org/web/20191216131452/https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf - packages have been broken in the past - then made available againI'm all-in for donating to package maintainers, but this bait and switch strategy feels a bit evil.Thought on this?

wmf · Accepted Answer

A lot of people/companies have painted themselves into corners where they made everything free for years then later they decided that they needed to make money. But now they can't turn on any business models that actually work because they irrevocably gave away everything. So people are trying to find the least-bad business model and it isn't pretty. These people are not mean; they're just desperate.Having said that, it's rude to break existing packages. Let it stagnate and put the updates in a different package if you want, but don't deliberately break something that used to work.

dossy · Answer

If the packages are of GPL'ed software, then you (anyone) are within your rights to charge a fee to download the software:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllow...
Of course, in order to comply with the GPL, you must make the source available as well. Which means, anyone else can turn around and either do the same thing, or even make a copy available for free:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLRequi...
If anyone feels strongly enough about these package maintainers charging a fee, they are welcome to pay the fee and then make the packages available free of charge.
But, that would be work. Less work than the work done by the original package creator, but still, work.
And, many people want to be compensated for their time. Ultimately, as long as the package maintainer charges a reasonable enough fee that the value provided exceeds the relative cost of the fee, then everyone wins.

antoineMoPa · Answer

I think the moral of the story is: don't rely on PPAs for long term projects - there is a trend to create packages to break them once people integrated them in their scripts/code/infrastructure.Instead, install packages from official reliable sources.