Updated 2023-08-15 to mention that our Facebook page is back up.
There's a lot that happens behind the scenes when managing an Open Source project that many people don't ever see. In this post we're going to cover two recent events that have personally caused me a lot of stress as I'm at the mercy of others. These are also completely orthogonal to Pidgin's development and instead have drastic effects on the communities around the project.
Debian and Cyrus-SASL
On May 15th, 2023, a bug was created in Debian's issue tracking about a license incompatibility between libpurple (GPLv2) and Cyrus-SASL (many licenses) that threatened to remove Pidgin from Debian before the Bookworm release.
Fortunately, Richard Laager, a Pidgin developer and the maintainer of our Debian package stepped up and stopped that from happening. However, we still had to deal with the licensing issues. But before we get into that, we of course need to look at some history.
Pidgin gained support for Cyrus-SASL back in 2005 via commit 32f6f8bf3a57. I'm not sure anyone checked for license compatibility back then or what, but it was merged and would be used if it was found.
At some point it got added to the Debian build. We don't know exactly because not all of the history is in the repository for the Debian packaging. This commit is the earliest one for the file that controls the build parameters and it has it. This revision is 16 years old at the time of this writing.
Again, I'm not sure what if any due diligence was done when it comes to licenses or if Cyrus-SASL even was maybe even compatible back then, but as you can see, this was the status quo for a very long time.
Thanks to the hard work of Richard, who was able to contact the original author of some of the problematically licensed code and get it re-licensed and got consensus on whether BSD-3-Clause-Attribution is GPL compatible or not the threat to libpurple and 27 other dependent packages being removed from Debian has been resolved.
On August 6th, 2023, I got a notification that our Facebook page for Pidgin had been taken down for violations of their Community Standards when it came to "misrepresentation". They didn't state what we're misrepresenting so we're completely at their mercy right now.
This page was created on April 21st, 2008 and has never had any previous warnings or violations or anything. So just removing it seems a bit heavy handed. It isn't super large or anything, but over the past 15 years we've accumulated 1,700 followers and we do end up doing a fair amount of support via it.
I've tried a number of ways to contact Facebook about this, starting with just an appeal of their original decision, but that was upheld within a few hours. Since then I've written a blog post on our website mentioning it, hoping they'll connect the dots as at that point I was unable to find a way to actually say anything to them.
I also tried reaching out via a contact form I found in the Meta Business Suite stuff, but as you might have guessed, haven't gotten a response from that either.
That brings me to today (Monday August 7th), where I decided to try and post as the page to see what'd happen. The thought was that the post might just be moderated until we're restored or whatever. But when trying to post it gave me this message:
So I filled out the feedback talking about everything and posting a link to the blog post on the main site. That was a few hours ago and we're still blocked, so who knows what will happen at this point.
Update 2023-08-15, sorry been busy...
As of Wednesday August 9th our page was published again by Facebook. The short story is that Meta launched a new AI to help them find and remove impersonators of their products. It was a bit over zealous and saw Messenger in our page title and unpublished our page. My appeal was denied with out any investigation, but thanks to some contacts of contacts, an internal appeal was initiated and got everything sorted out.
Closing
I hope you're enjoying these posts! Remember they go live for patrons at 9AM CST on Mondays and go public at 12AM CST on Thursdays! If there's something specific you'd like to see me cover here, please comment below!
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