Re: Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian
Stefano Sabatini wrote:
> Please refrain from claiming other people are spreading lies,
> especially with no specific references (and this is not the place
> where to discuss such things).
Attila already amended one of the false statement that had been spun
around (about the people behind Libav "stealing" infrastructure from
whoever), Kieran already amended the claim of avresample being a fork of
swresample.
The list is quite long and debunking each of the statements could take a
lot of time.
I'm going to address two historical "misrepresentations":
# The change of management
Michael Niedermayer managed to get demoted from his leader position by
the topmost 18[1] people involved in FFmpeg by the time due his tendency
of not following the rules. that after weeks from being voted to stay as
leader by 15, 5 explicitly stating their vote was conditioned by his
behaviour and 1 definitely against him.[2]
His demotion is due to acts in full disregard of the policies in place,
even those enforced automatically by the svn hooks.
The fact he bullied and belittled volunteers and contributor can be
checked by digging the mailing list during the months and the year
before the management change and it adds up.
# The split
The split is mainly due to trademark ownership:
He managed to gain back the use of the name from Fabrice Bellard, the
trademark owner and the only one controlling the dns, thus the people
not agreeing with Michael decided to just use a different name and
keep working on the project.
The dns started pointing another host, the people owning the previous
infrastructure kept owning their boxes as Attila already explained.
Now back to the rest of the email and yet another misconception.
> As for me, I don't consider Libav developers neither friends nor
> enemies. We reached a point when we got two different projects with
> different policies, culture, and guidelines. Then you should be aware
> that the way the Libav fork was created was hostile towards FFmpeg, so
No, Libav as project enforces a set of simple rules and enforces them
for everybody, no matter who.
The people working on Libav were hostile to Michael Niedermayer attitude
to override any rules for himself and use the same rules to hammer
whoever confronted him.
> you shouldn't be surprised that there was (and still there is) a
> perceived hostility between the two projects. If you or other Libav or
> FFmpeg developers want the two projects to collaborate more, this can
> be discussed, possibly with *specific* proposals, but again,
> debian-devel is not the right place where to discuss such things.
Personally I have no problems in collaborating with anybody.
Although it could be a little difficult collaborating with the person
that suggested to fund our burial [3] and I'm quite sure the other one
that called us swine back in the time and refused to even say hi to me
in person this year when we were at the same booth at LinuxTag.
lu
[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/423703/
[2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/118594
[3] https://lists.ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-January/107416.html
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