Niklas Haas (12025-01-02): > I think you overlook the deep ties and decades of involvement some of us > have with the open source multimedia scene, not to mention those whose day > job literally depends on the continued existence of FFmpeg. > > It is not exactly trivial to just pack up and leave, which is a situation > not dissimilar to citizens living in a country.
First, a short answer: if somebody depends on FFmpeg, that is not FFmpeg's problem. Using a piece of software does not give rights over the development of that piece of software or duties to the developers. Then, about people who contribute: they still decided to contribute as adults, knowing what could happen. That makes it more similar to immigrating into a country than being born in it. And it could be years before immigrants get full citizen rights; often it never happens. Yet people still choose to immigrate in countries knowing they will not get a mandatory say in its policy. The reasons are multiple: economic opportunities, liberties, social interactions. The same goes for a Libre Software project: people contribute for the contribution itself, because they need it or because it makes them feel good; they do not contribute in order to get control over the rest of the code. But if they stay around and prove competent and trustworthy and aligned with the spirit of the project, they do get a say in its direction. Not in a mandatory manner, but still. And that is as it should be. And that leads me to ask again, because nobody has yet provided a satisfactory answer: Why should people who contribute very little have as much say in the direction of a project as people who have been in it for years, contributed immensely and will continue to do so? > I am not sure this is the most appropriate analogy, as I think the vast > majority of software projects are not trying to "win", nor to achieve any > other kind of defined "goal"; and the few exceptions that do exist tend to > more closely resemble the organizational structure of a company. No analogy is ever prefect, unless you compare a thing with itself. But the differences do not negate the power of an analogy to illustrate an argument. In this instance, we can say that the goal of a Libre Software project is to make progress into producing good code, and its victories are when new features get added that make users happy. Michael has led FFmpeg to more such victories than the people who want to get rid of them, and it has slowed down as the “democracy” took more place in the project. > I think these flaws are valid but not particularly relevant to the current > situation. > > The majority of e-mails involved in the recent discussions seem to come from > people who have also been involved in the community for a very long time; > as opposed to unjustly overrepresented "drive-by contributors". You can observe that the real attacks trying to get rid of Michael, the bullying, come from a limited number of email addresses. Yet they get majority in the votes when it comes to it. I conclude from this that there is a silent majority in the GA that votes for its own interest, for the promise of no more playing around with useless new ideas and instead getting on to managing releases and fuzzing the code. 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".
