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What is Your Operating System of Choice?
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Your supervisor is thinking about you.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 29, @02:02AM
The kerfuffle between ffmpeg and libav was NOT over licensing. Instead, a large number of developers made an announcement that they were staging a coup and taking over the project. That came as a surprise to Fabrice Bellard and Michael Niedermayer, the absolute geniuses that represented something like 80% of the code base at the time. They tried to take over the domains, repos, trademarks, etc., but Ballard legally owned all of those. So, they were legally forced to make their own.
Despite losing the repos and the Gods-among-men responsible for most of the code, they decided to push forward. They created their own fork, and copied the logo and name of the library as libav. They used their positions at a number of distros to force them to change from ffmpeg to libav. The problem is that ffmpeg and its creators were better in every way that matters to basically everyone. They stayed ahead of security bugs, kept up with the latest codecs, had better performance and optimization support, responded to packagers, and even maintained compatibility with libav, etc. Libav, on the otherhand, stagnated, introduced their own bugs, had some fairly large issues, and continually feel behind and less responsive. Frankly, Ballard and Niedermayer were just better software engineers than the attempted usurpers. This left no choice but for them to change back to ffmpeg. Libav was left by its creators to wither on the vine while they moved on to other things.