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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, Informative) by Gravis on Wednesday August 05 2015, @10:58PM
one of the issues here is that the LibAV fork is almost compatible but decided to keep the filenames the same. stupidly the debian package maintainers decided that being almost completely compatible was good enough to allow packages that were dependent on ffmpeg to install libav instead. the result is some programs will seemingly randomly bail out when trying to decode some formats. i know this is true with FLAC because QMMP has this exact issue.
a proper solution to this issue would be to create a standard API and let whatever library you choose fill in the details. this takes a lot of effort but i think the resulting API would be a great contribution to the open source community as a whole.