I'm not sure why this is posted here, but please note that this was written more than 10 years ago, and a lot of things changed since then. It's important to take this article from an historical perspective, keeping in mind that it was written by someone with "interests" in the matter (as much as I wanted to be objective, let's not lie to ourselves, I was a FFmpeg developer first). The popularity of this article played an important role in "public's opinion" (it's my most popular article ever).
Nowadays, even though I've been distant to the project for years now, I can say the situation changed in a good way (from my perspective). The projects are unified again because people from both sides made difficult compromises. I think it would make sense to focus on how the issue was resolved rather that why it was so bad. This fire is extinguished, let's work on keeping things as peaceful as we can.
For the record, I mostly left FFmpeg development years ago. And while it wasn't the only factor, the merge effort and overall tension actually drained me pretty badly at that time. Of course, this is also true for several people from both sides, and surprising to no one the project(s) lost many developers in the process.
The multimedia community is plagued with drama like this, but this one was particularly destructive. We can certainly take lessons from this, but I'll leave that to the historians.
That was a lesson that distros and their repositories are walled gardens just like the various application stores over in the mobile world, curated strictly at the whims of certain individuals or organizations.
It gave me a newfound appreciation for the "just find, install and run whatever whenever wherever" gung ho attitude found in Windows (and to a lesser extent MacOS and Android).
It’s much later that you realize that someone is doing the work to keep those working, and decisions are being made all the time about which version, which project, etc.
The one I first really noticed was MySQL being silently replaced with MariaDB.
As a user trying to debug commands suggested on internet didn't work because your version of ffmpeg wasn't actually ffmpeg was kind of insane. And that might be because other applications assumed that "ffmpeg" wasn't something else.
I agree with your sentiment but this is one step further, more akin of active sabotage. How ubuntu just went along with this is beyond me.
I think it is just with any Open Source Project. The more people there are, the more politics.
Generally speaking once you past 35+ you should gain a new world view how many of these things works and relate to other subjects in the real world.
I asked ChatGPT for an example to work in memory instead of ffmpeg with files and it just went on and on... plus the dependencies were pretty clearly most at home on Linux.
Might have been my inexperience?
I was hoping to combine lengthy h264 .mts video files chopped at 4GB by the video camera into one YouTube upload without duplicating on disk first.
Edit: also maybe some simple filters/ML to detect anything interesting to clip and merge into a time lapse.
JB, when’s the next VDD?
It has been a difficult process, but we got things done, in the end...
I'm glad we're past this.
> JB, when’s the next VDD?
This fall, I hope in Sicily. :)
This was discussed here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34555465
I knew that wasn't true, and it was pretty insulting to be so brazenly lied to like that. It degraded my opinion of the Debian distro several notches.
(Also, remember when the version of the Bitcoin client in the Debian repo contained hardcoded addresses of several gambling sites which it prevented you from sending to? I think it was pretty clear that Debian maintainers had a lot of power, and sometimes abused that power.)
(Edit: It seems my memory is faulty, and this "modified" version of the bitcoin client was distributed with Gentoo, not Debian: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/10/17/the-blacklist-de... )
The FFmpeg/Libav situation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4183209 - June 2012 (51 comments)
