[FFmpeg-user] List members behaving badly

[Phil Rhodes]

People, please...
I offer the following in the hope that it can be viewed as constructive criticism.
The argument here is effectively one which has been raging for years - decades, even - and it is not helping anyone.
The open source community is notorious for being poorly socialised and indulging in excessively pedantic or deliberately unhelpful behaviour. I have commented on this list about it many times and I stand by those comments. This is an example of that.
This holds back open source software in all its forms. It serves to put off new users who might become useful contributors in time. It alienates people with useful expertise who are not software engineers. The problems caused by all of this are highly visible in open source software in general, and ffmpeg in particular.
I don't know what the solution is, but it must necessarily involve everyone being nicer to each other, and not trying to jusify unprofessional, discourteous behaviour.
I've been saying it for years and I'm going to keep saying it: FOSS could do so much better than it does, almost solely because of exactly this sort of bad behaviour.
-P