Re: Bug#729203: [FFmpeg-devel] Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 1:29 AM, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:

I personally don't have enough information to know why libav was chosen
instead of FFmpeg, and the discussion on debian-devel so far has mostly
come from FFmpeg advocates. So there's probably another side to the story
that hasn't been stated here yet.

libav was not chosen in Debian

ffmpeg had a leadership crisis a few years ago: Michael Niedermaier (who has written here) was accused of dictatorial methods by some ffmpeg developers. I don't know if they were right or not in their complains and frankly, I don't care.

Those guys tried a coup d'etat, stealing the domain, name, code repository, logo and everything and leaving Michael out. When Michael was able to recover control of some things, and get a new hosting, source repository, etc, they forked ffmpeg in libav. The libav guys knowingly tried and still try to break ffmpeg by using the same library names and for a long time, version numbers too.

The Debian maintainer of ffmpeg at the time (Reinhard, who has written here too) was one of the guys who took the libav side instead of the ffmpeg side. He used the ffmpeg package names to provide libav, and actively blocked any effort that would lead to src:ffmpeg being actual ffmpeg.org. That's why we have libav now instead of ffmpeg.

I'm all for forks but if you do a fork, at least you do it with ethics: different library names, sonames, etc. The libav developers have tried from minute zero to create a conflict. And what has been the outcome of that? A library which worse than ffmpeg in features, codec support, security, and essentially everything. As someone mentioned way back in the thread, the only people who seem to prefer libav over ffmpeg are the libav developers.

I am not involved in libav or ffmpeg and if libav would be better technically, in security, etc, I would be all for libav, even with all the ill-intented methods they used. But it's not the case: they disrupt peaceful open source communities (see this discussion, it's not the first time in Debian and it has happened in other distributions too) with what goal?... forcing a worse library in technical regards? OMG. Pointless.

--
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)