Ask HN: Thoughts on creating packages and breaking them for profit?

3 points

3 years ago

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 again

I'm all-in for donating to package maintainers, but this bait and switch strategy feels a bit evil.

Thought on this?

5 comments