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FFmpeg Project Leader Quits, Says He's Had Enough With Forks of AV Libraries

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

Arthur T Knackerbracket grabs the following from TheRegister:

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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:33PM (#218729)

    Some of the team were unpleased with their additions not being adopted in good time, forked and used their position with distributions to imply that their fork was the new upstream with a new name. Niedermayer responded by including all changes made in libav in ffmpeg as well as continuing his development and so becoming a superset of the two projects.

    I thought his demonstration that he could apply others changes in good time and continue development would have silenced or at least muted the opposition but sadly not.

    As the IT crowd says, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVSlE28hOgI [youtube.com]

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:41PM (#218761)

    I thought *they* had prevailed: they made him apply others’ changes in good time by actually forking.

    Children on both sides….