[FFmpeg-devel] [ANNOUNCE] New FFmpeg maintainership

[Diego Biurrun]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 11:39:24PM +0100, Stefano Sabatini wrote:
> On date Tuesday 2011-01-18 19:53:41 +0100, Attila Kinali encoded:
> > We, the undersigned, announce that as of today FFmpeg maintainership
> > has been assumed by a new team.  Our aim is to facilitate the
> > development of exciting new features in a timely manner while keeping
> > high quality standards and above all to provide a fair, productive
> > environment for developers and contributors.
> 
> I can understand some of the reasons for this change, and I can even
> agree with them. But it should have been better to announce and
> discuss publically on this list.
> 
> This hasn't happened, and this sounds higly unrespectful for all the
> FFmpeg developers not involved in the change.

There is a time for words and there is a time for action.

Many words have been exchanged over the past years, many flames have
been endured and the disgruntlement has been growing continuously.

There have been behind-the-scenes attempts to make amends, but they
failed and the urgency of the situation was completely underestimated.

The discontent reached the point where a fork was being contemplated
and then planned, but it turned out that the momentum had soared way
past critical mass and turned into a tidal wave of revolution.  The
focus moved from forking to avoiding a fork if possible.

Since git was being set up on videolan.org, setting up an alternative
git tree on mphq was the natural choice.  With development moving to
videolan.org and such a large group of developers already part of the
revolution keeping the infrastructure was the logical consequence.

Apologies if the speed and suddenness of our actions were a surprise to
some.  The intention was not to exclude the people who did not receive
timely notification, this is mostly a matter of timing and coincidence,
not ill will.  We tried to contact almost everyone, but did not succeed
with all.  Not everybody was on IRC, others, like you for example, did
not answer the phone or react to SMS messages and/or email.

It became clear that we could not wait much longer, so at some point we
just moved forward.  Maybe things were rushed, possibly something could
have been done differently, but we did not believe it would have made a
material difference apart from long and drawn-out flamewars.

We hope and expect to have done the right thing for FFmpeg in the long
run and will work on turning the project into a healthy and welcoming
development environment.

Everybody is welcome and invited to join the community to work on
FFmpeg, all past and present and future developers included.

Diego