I trust Debian developers far more

i definitely agree with you here :)

I think it was poppler or evince that decided they were going to enforce the no-copy-and-paste bit you can set on pdfs. Debian patched it out.

I found the notion of free software implementing PDF DRM rather hilarious, so I had to know more. First I found this help page which confirms that evince does have code which implements PDF restrictions, but it says that its override_restrictions option is enabled by default.

But I wondered: when did this get implemented? and was it ever enabled by default? So, I went digging, and here are the answers:

• in May 2005, the restrictions were implemented in evince in this commit
• in September 2005, the override_restrictions option was added in this commit, after discussion in bug #305818
• in December 2006 bug #382700 was opened, requesting that override_restrictions be enabled by default
• in January 2008, the default changed in this commit - but only after someone pointed out that the PDF spec does not in fact require the restrictions to be enforced. (The spec says “It is up to the implementors of PDF consumer applications to respect the intent of the document creator by restricting user access”) 😂

I don’t see any indication that Debian patched this out during the time when evince had it enabled by default, but I’m sure they would have eventually if GNOME hadn’t come to their senses :)

I’ve seen Mozilla decide they were going to enforce their trademarks. They carved out special exceptions for various distros but that still would have meant you would have to rename Firefox if you were to fork Debian. Debian had none of it.

In my opinion both sides of the Debian–Mozilla trademark dispute were actually pretty reasonable and certainly grounded in good intentions. Fortunately they resolved it eventually, with Mozilla relaxing their restrictions in 2016 (while still reserving the right to enforce their trademark against derivatives which make modifications they find unreasonable):

Mozilla recognizes that patches applied to Iceweasel/Firefox don’t impact the quality of the product.

Patches which should be reported upstream to improve the product always have been forward upstream by the Debian packagers. Mozilla agrees about specific patches to facilitate the support of Iceweasel on architecture supported by Debian or Debian-specific patches.

More generally, Mozilla trusts the Debian packagers to use their best judgment to achieve the same quality as the official Firefox binaries.

In case of derivatives of Debian, Firefox branding can be used as long as the patches applied are in the same category as described above.

Downsides of distro pacakges:

• someone needs to package an application for each distro
• applications often need to maintain support for multiple versions of some of their dependencies to be able to continue to work on multiple distros
• users of different distros use different versions of the application, creating more support work for upstream
• users of some distros can’t use the application at all because there is no package
• adding 3rd party package repos is dangerous; every package effectively gets root access, and in many cases every repo has the ability to replace any distro-provided package by including one with a higher version number. 3rd party repos bring the possibility of breaking your system through malice or incompetence.

Downsides of flatpak:

• application maintainers are responsible for shipping and updating their dependencies, and may be less competent at doing timely security updates than distro security teams
• more disk space is used by applications potentially bringing their own copies of the same dependencies

🤔