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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the perhaps-a-spoon-instead-of-a-fork-next-time? dept.

The leader of the FFmpeg open source project has resigned amid ongoing turmoil among the project's developers.

On Friday, [Michael] Niedermayer announced via the FFmpeg mailing list that he was resigning his role as the project's lead maintainer, largely due to the ongoing schism among its developer community:

will i ever return ? ... i might ..., if theres a nice and friendly environment, no hostile forks or at least none i have to interact with. But i will certainly not return as leader, this is not really a role i ever truly liked, more one i ended up with.

Trouble first arose among the FFmpeg developers in 2011, when a group of contributors decided to fork the project's code into a new project called Libav.

The exact reasons for the schism are hard to decipher. A lot of it seems to boil down to personal bad blood and conflicts over project management, rather than disagreements about technical matters. The fork has proven to be one of the more contentious in open source history.

In his resignation letter, Niedermayer said the ongoing pressures that resulted from FFmpeg and Libav being maintained as separate projects was one of the main factors in his decision to step down:


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:06PM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:06PM (#218684) Journal

    Well, after reading TFA, that might not be the case. Debian initially switched to LibAV but has since switched back again. But having 2 groups competing rather than cooperating is a waste of resources and knowledge.

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  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by Aighearach on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:34AM

    by Aighearach (2621) on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:34AM (#218983)

    having 2 groups competing rather than cooperating is a waste of resources and knowledge

    Eh, or the competition magnifies the quality of the result.

    Lets not just assume that black is white. What if it isn't?