[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: Fwd: Request to mailing list ffmpeg-devel rejected

[Roman Shaposhnick]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 04:08:31PM -0400, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> ?????? 05 ??????? 2006 15:42 ?? ????????:
> > wrong, your 2 mails where hold for moderator approval because you
> > are not
> > subscribed (the list is members only due to spam issues, and i mean
> > real
> > spam, not the somewhat offtopic and rude stuff you posted)
>
> My message was not "rude" -- it was sarcastic. Sarcastic at posting
> broken
> links and at the unprofessionalism of being unable/unwilling to
> produce a *release* of the project.

  I think you fail to understand the difference between the notions of a
Project
and a Product. A project is a place where code gets developed. A product
is what gets built on top of the project when a particular vendor wants
to satisfy his customers. It is rather naive to think that source code
and a build machine is all that is needed to convert a project into
a product. FFMpeg is a project (and a pretty dynamic one at that),
Cinerella would be a product, just like the Linux kernel is a project
(notice how Linus discarded the "stable" vs. "unstable" numbering
schemes)
and RedHat Linux based on a particular version of the Linux kernel
is a product (you have no idea how many patches vendors apply to the
stock kernel before they release it). I hope these example clarify
the situation, but if you have further questions please email me
directly.

> Who do I think I am, indeed? How about, I am someone, who is trying to
> port
> ffmpeg-using software to his less-then-typical system and struggling 
> with the
> different bugs, that different ffmpeg-bundling wares have in their
> distributions.
>
> And it is not -- in my opinion -- the wares-authors' fault. Due to
> your
> above-mentioned inability/unwillingness to make a release, they can
> not
> simply say: "build ffmpeg release such-and-such or later"...

  No. It is vendors responsibility to convert a project into a product.
It is vendors responsibility to determine the level of stability and
compatibility required for that. Come to think of it -- something
that is useful for Xine could be completely useless for a set-top
box software, yet both of them would be built on top of the FFMpeg
project.

  One of the greatest myths of OpenSource is that Project == Product. It
took
me a while working for one of the oldest UNIX shops to realize that.

Thanks,
Roman.