It's kinda shitty, but after reading the other links in the post I can't say it's very surprising.

Bottles devs seem weirdly hostile to the idea of anyone repackaging their software, because apparently they're the only ones that are able to do it properly.

edit: devs also refuse bug reports from any version that's not Flatpak, so in this context removing the button doesn't seem that unreasonable.

edit2: now that I've had a closer look at the PR mentioned in the post I'm not surprised at all.
Bottles devs are actively hostile. Apparently with this PR it's impossible to run Bottles outside Flatpak without the package maintainers patching the code.

Go OpenSUSE, based AF.

Someone seems to have gone and fixed the mess: https://build.opensuse.org/projects/openSUSE:Factory/packages/Bottles/files/Bottles.changes?expand=1

The creator and maintainer of openSUSE Aeon leans towards support of the decision, as he says "package maintaners can do whatever they want".

I support suse in this regard.

2 things to the bottles devs:

1. Focus on improving your software, not who is redistributing it.

2. If packaging it is "so difficult," maybe you could be doing a better job to make it easier? Just an idea!

In all honesty, the bottles team doesn't want people to repackage their software because their donation buttons might get removed. Greedy little fellas!

I read the drama in Twitter and PR.

While Bottles maintainer does not do a great job to politely prove the point of the patch to disable Bottles outside of sandboxed environments, he is not required to be a diplomat as mainter (though it would be better, of course) and Bottles decision makes total sense - they asked to not package their software long ago as they drown in bugs and supporting non predictable environment with unknown dependencies creates too many problems for them. I can understand that, development is hard as it is, unpredictability of environment multiplies this complexity.

They are maintainers and they do what they can to support the project, so removing donate button while packaging software done by others (who asked not to do it) is a childish move. Yes it's FOSS, but morally it sounds a bit wrong.

We ask too much of mainters when it comes to soft skills, not all of us got these, but also not all of us are FOSS maintainers. And I think we should stop asking everyone to possess all skills in the world and react on someone's rudeness as we are 5 (not saying we shouldn't improve).

https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/2345#issuecomment-1733132198

To me it looks like the devs of Bottles said that they'd be patching Bottles to remove support links in non-flatpak versions.

So... isn't what openSUSE did in the spirit of that? Obviously, them packaging it at all is against the devs' wishes, but... I dunno, this whole thing is a mess.

Edit: I may have confused "support links" with the "donate button". However, I am still confused, and this situation is a mess. I sympathize with the bottles devs, because it's good software, and they are largely volunteer developers. Beyond that? *exaggerated shrug*

that's embarrassing one thing is to patch it to make it work on your system but to remove the donation buttons entirely...