[FFmpeg-devel] [ANNOUNCE] New FFmpeg maintainership

[Robert Krüger]

On 19.01.2011, at 01:58, Diego Biurrun wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 

Reminds me a lot of GWB rethoric. Look at your probably thousands of lines of passionate emails on this list about justice, double standards etc. and then this??

> 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

Please read your own words. "Time for action", "tidal wave of revolution"?? You're not saving pregnant women and babies from being slaughtered here. No further questions.

But now enough of what could be taken as personal insults.

I'm just an unimportant ffmpeg user who in the past has submitted a small number of bug reports and trivial patches and in some occasions has organized founding for a dev to fix some bugs so I don't count as a voter on anything.

However, I just felt the urge to say as an ffmpeg user that the coup d'?tat style of this move is very troubling, especially regarding the fact that this might lead to a situation where there is that group of very important devs who signed this announcement on one side or fork or whatever and Michael (I doubt anyone following this project would argue against his importance for this project, not to mention that it doesn't take much to imagine how he must perceive this personally) and maybe others (haven't heard anything from Carl-Eugen or Baptiste, for example) on the other. I share with Stefano that I don't understand why this could not have been done in public. If there is a dev majority for this a vote would have done the job but this really just feels like "enough of talking" and doesn't exactly leave a wide open door for reconciliation.  

Anyway, I'll continue to use ffmpeg (which fork remains to be seen) and still hope for what seems to have become very unlikely with this move (reading Luca's mail makes me think i am not alone with that). Having multiple forks is not a big problem for bug fixes as many of those can be interchanged/pulled if licenses are compatible. But the thought of having the main devs split up in two or three groups with APIs diverging over time (libavfilter comes to mind) gives me the creeps. This would simply be bad for ffmpeg or at least anyone using ffmpeg.    

Best regards,

Robert