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XDA, and many Linux veterans, often recommend Linux Mint as the best distro for newcomers. However, it seems not everyone holds it in such high regard, as one GNOME Calendar developer has called it a “hostile downstream” for failing to co-operate with them.
As spotted by Linuxiac, Hari Rana, a GNOME Calendar developer, vented their frustrations about how Linux Mint is handling their app. While GNOME Calendar has received updates for some time now, Rana says that the Linux Mint developers haven’t been updating it on their end.
This is all well and fine, but the problem is that Linux Mint tells users to contact the GNOME Calendar developers if something goes wrong with it. As such, GNOME Calendar’s maintainers receive confusing bug reports because the version on Linux Mint is now quite outdated.
To help alleviate the issue, Rana states they contacted Linux Mint, asking them to remove any links to GNOME Calendar’s developers and to rebrand the app. After a back-and-forth, Linux Mint proved uncooperative and locked the ticket.
Rana states that interactions like this are a “lose-lose” situation:
Once they start packaging your software, they immediately burn their bridges implicitly. In order to show that they are ‘good’, they only pretend to care about the problem, and keep proposing ‘solutions’ that 1. have nothing to do with the underlying problem and 2. put on significantly more burden to upstream without putting an equal amount of effort themselves.
Rana states that cases like this don’t reach the public often because people who are maintaining these projects are usually indie developers who end up burning out over the problems and abandoning the project entirely.
Rana rounds out their blog post by saying that upstream developers are in a lose-lose situation when handling hostile downstreams. If the developer is kind, they are placed on a near-eternal waiting list to have their problem solved. If the developer gets frustrated and acts rudely, downstreams will use that as an excuse to ignore the issue. Even worse, if an upstream legally muscles in to protect both their work and their maintainers, they risk being perceived as “the Nintendo of free software” and villainized.