F-Droid deletes a GPL violation report as "off-topic", a board member chases the reporter to GitHub as a "bot", the maintainer who closes the complaint says he'd have done the same. Whose side is the free software app store on?

Here's what happened in F-Droid's name on 2026-09-02, all public, all timestamped:

  • 03:47 UTC: forum.f-droid.org deletes a new account whose only act was posting a sourced GPL compliance report. No rule cited. No warning. The topic never left the moderation queue.
  • 03:49 UTC: two minutes later, vdbhb59, forum title "Contributor, F-Droid Board Member" (https://forum.f-droid.org/u/vdbhb59), turns up on another project's tracker, Telegram-FOSS on GitHub, and writes: "please delete this comment from the bot above. The bot has come and posted on several forums. Just created account and posted this. Banned them. Reporting this as well." https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/issues/377#issuecomment-5504070601
  • 09:04 UTC: issue #700 (closed), which asked why, is closed 80 seconds after my reply, with "ah, ok then". None of its questions about the deletion or the board member gets an answer.
  • 09:07 UTC: Licaon_Kter, on the closed issue: "if your very own FIRST post is an offtopic, sorry... but I would have deleted your post and account too."

So a board member of the free software app store had a GPL report removed, followed its author to another project to get the same report deleted there, and reported the author as a bot. Two minutes apart. Then the maintainer who closed the complaint in 80 seconds said he'd have deleted the account too.

Now read F-Droid's own Code of Conduct (https://f-droid.org/docs/Code_of_Conduct/), the one that sends complaints to this tracker:

  • "Serious or persistent offenders will be temporarily or permanently banned." One first post, sitting in a moderation queue, is neither serious nor persistent. It's the lowest bar for a ban there is, and two people with F-Droid titles are defending it.
  • "Assume good faith." The board member's first and only response to a sourced report was "bot". Nobody on any site has quoted one line of the report as wrong. Not vdbhb59, not forum staff, not Licaon_Kter.
  • "Be respectful... Disagreement is no excuse for poor behaviour or personal attacks." Branding a named person a bot on another project's tracker and asking for them to be deleted and reported is a personal attack, made under F-Droid's name.

The "off-topic" story doesn't survive the forum's own history either. The app in the report, Plus Messenger, was submitted to this forum by its own developer in 2015 as "GNU GPL v2" (https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/plus/). A report that the same app has shipped no corresponding source since 2017 and now carries a proprietary ad and billing layer is about as on-topic as a free software app store's forum gets. Licaon_Kter also writes that I "admit knowing that what you did was not proper". I said that if a moderator thought the topic off-topic, the remedy was to decline the topic. That's a description of moderation, not a confession, and turning it into one is exactly the behaviour this Code of Conduct was written against.

I'm not a bot. I'm one person with one report, posted to a handful of relevant places on the same day, under a pseudonym because the developer behind the app also made WhatsApp Plus and I'd rather he didn't have my name.

Take a step back and look at what F-Droid did here. The developer of a 50-million-install app that has ignored the GPL for nine years didn't have to lift a finger. F-Droid deleted the report for him, chased the reporter to GitHub for him, and called the reporter a bot for him. Then a maintainer closed the complaint in 80 seconds and declared GPL violations "off-topic" for the forum of a project whose entire reason to exist is that licences mean something. If the developer is reading this, he owes vdbhb59 a thank-you note. Nobody at F-Droid has asked a single question about the violation. Every question has been about me.

Questions, for anyone at F-Droid who isn't one of the two people above:

  1. Did vdbhb59 act as an F-Droid board member or as a private person? That title is set by forum admins, not by the user. F-Droid presents this person as a board member.
  2. Was vdbhb59 the staff member who deleted the account? "Banned them", two minutes after the deletion, reads exactly like that.
  3. Who reviews a complaint when the person complained about sits on the board and the maintainer who closes the complaint says he'd have done the same?
  4. Will the GitHub comment be withdrawn, and will someone say on the record whether F-Droid wants GPL compliance reports or not?

Everything above links to something you can open. Close this one in 80 seconds too if you like. It goes in the public write-up either way: https://xdaforums.com/t/plus-messenger-9-years-of-telegram-gpl-code-with-no-source-now-with-an-unpublished-paid-ads-layer.4800334/