Niklas Haas (12024-12-27): > Having read (but not participated in) a good chunk of the recent discussions, > here is my attempt at a summarization of the core issue: FFmpeg brands itself > a democratic project, but it effectively runs on a "benevolent dictator for > life" model. The main source of frustration is this disconnect between what > the relevant parties think ought to be, and what is. One side clearly wants to > move the needle towrds decentralization of power, and the other side clearly > wants to retain, or even strengthen, a centralized power model.
Small point about the history of the project to put this into context. This is all from memory, as searching in the archives is quite inefficient (if somebody knows a search engine?): In the early 2000s, Michael was the acknowledged project leader, appointed by Fabrice. As the late 2000s neared, Michael got increasingly criticized for his leadership. Mostly, the issue was that he was accepting too much experimental code to the opinion of some recent contributors. In other words, he was making the project too hacker-friendly and not enough business-friendly. That criticism increased, to the point that I consider bullying, and Michael eventually announced that he resigned as project leader in favor of a community leadership, without specific details. Some time after that IIRC, at the time where the project switched from Subversion to Git hosted by vlan, a handful of developers announced a complete change of governance of the project that took everybody else by surprise: http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-January/106403.html The developers who were not in this did not agree, and neither did Fabrice. Therefore, thanks to a switch in DNS, control was given back to Michael's faction, with a lot of trouble; for example some mailing list archives were lost or hard to recover. The developers who made the change resorted to making their side a fork that they called libav. Since they had on their side some distribution maintainers, distributions switched to libav. Starting from this point, the two projects evolved in parallel. On the libav side, the attitude was to pretend they were the only project, the real ffmpeg that has just changed its name. They applied a very rigid policy of submitting patches for review on the ML, but increasingly the patches ended being reviewed by somebody who did not know the code well. Once in a blue moon, one of them would cherry-pick a patch from the ffmpeg side and submit it for review, but it was very seldom, some obvious trivial bugs fixed in ffmpeg stayed unfixed in libav. On the ffmpeg side, development continued like before, with much less strife on the mailing-list. And almost every day, Michael would merge the changes in libav into ffmpeg. That was a tremendous work and I do not know how Michael managed to keep on top of it for years. We made a collective effort when big changes had to be merged, especially the switch to refcounted frames. Progressively, as libav neglected to fix bugs, removed features and progressed slowly, and ffmpeg progressed faster and gained important features, distributions switched back to ffmpeg and occasional contributors proposed they patches to ffmpeg rather than libav. At some point, I do not exactly know when, libav died and its members started coming back in the ffmpeg project. I strongly suggest to read the list of names in the 2011 mail I have quoted earlier and compare it to the list of people who criticize Michael now. Regards, -- Nicolas George _______________________________________________ ffmpeg-devel mailing list ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org https://ffmpeg.org/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel To unsubscribe, visit link above, or email ffmpeg-devel-requ...@ffmpeg.org with subject "unsubscribe".
