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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:
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:01PM
I don't know what the actual details of the dispute witb libav are
Oh, you're better off not knowing. Like watching sausage being made. Its like something out of a daytime drama. Could sell as a drama book or somehow as a movie even to non-techies. It was never really a technological issue. I'm trying to recall which Shakespeare (or other?) dramatic play is the closest to the story.
I don't have a dog in the fight although I have opinions from having watched this for a couple years, but I think its non-controversial to claim that the "press release" is only one very biased side of the long agonizing story.
My controversial and opinionated view is the leader and the team didn't get along absolutely cannot work together, so the team took off and forked, although the fork looked super healthy at first eventually everyone abandoned it and went home (no I'm not kidding, crazy as it sounds!), and whereas two years ago the team wouldn't tolerate working with the leader so they left, you could interpret this announcement as the leader is now the one refusing to work with the team so he left.
I'm sure you'll be totally surprised to hear (groan at sarcasm) that the one dude alone was much faster at stuff like simple security patches, and not having anyone to argue with kind of helped, meanwhile the team found it difficult to apply simple buffer overflow patches within a month because, you know, team, and all that. Some of the Debian debate is dry and technical yet hilarious about how non-productive the team was WRT security issues. I guess one way to look at it is the fork really died like a year (or more) ago and it just took Debian etc that long to notice and dump, so its unfair to evaluate a living team by looking at its performance after its already dead, like some monty python beating a dead horse routine.
Its kind of a maintenance project because nothing changes very fast. Its possible the ideal personnel design for a growing project (like a big team) is not ideal for a semi-static maintenance project. In other words I'm saying the team not getting along with the leader might not matter if, frankly, its a one man project. I'm sure nine women trying to produce a baby in one month would create massive drama, but lets face it, nine women trying to create a baby under no time constraint at all isn't going to work either because its a one person job being team-ed into non-productivity. Everyone's seen stuff like this at work where you take a one person job that can be done in a week and next thing you know there's a giant dysfunctional committee that'll never execute, ever. Never design something more complicated than it needs to be, and honestly sleepy maintenance of a boring video codec probably should be "one dude" in 2015. That's why he was so successful more or less alone when the team forked themselves, its not like a project that small actually needs a team. Meanwhile the team crashed and burned because that's what teams do, they always lower reliability of projects.
Its interesting that the leader and his team were oil and water, but the dude and the general public is, AFAIK, OK dude. Likely the team aren't all crazies. So its a real life example of basically good people just plain old not getting along.
Hopefully the future won't crash and burn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @10:27PM
You had me until you mentioned the thing about nine women trying to have a baby all at once. There's not enough scientific evidence to prove that nine women aren't more productive at having a baby than a single woman.
I'm willing to participate as the male in a scientific harem to help find out. I mean study. Scientific study.
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:44AM
Curious on this: how many active people are involved in this, by and large?
Also, how did this happened for that project? As I understand, it is mostly people with expert knowledge that write codecs, or math libs... These type of people tend to be pretty stable, I have observed...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax