FFmpeg turmoil

Posted Jan 19, 2011 17:48 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: FFmpeg turmoil

Well, this is fun. Fiery rhetoric, 'the tidal wave of revolution', mention from several people that they feel 'stabbed in the back' or 'personally insulted' and that the original posters 'should have forked'...

... nobody (including the 'revolutionaries') seems to have noted that forking is exactly what this is: a new publically visible git repo. Anyone can set up one of those, and impose whatever procedures they want on commits to it, however bizarre. All this flaming over it is merely a sign that the ffmpeg people haven't really got used to the fork-is-good merge-is-easy world that git brings.

One Bad Fork Deserves Another...

Posted Jan 19, 2011 20:00 UTC (Wed) by jimwelch (guest, #178) [Link] (2 responses)

If this "fork" turns out to be a bad idea or if the new group puts up some kind of brick wall to some devs, It can always be forked again. BUT who owns the name? Is it trademarked? A trademark always has an owner. When Ethereal forked, it became wireshark because of the trademark. GPL does not protect against trademark.

One Bad Fork Deserves Another...

Posted Jan 19, 2011 22:35 UTC (Wed) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (1 responses)

the domain ffmpeg.org is owned by Fabrice Bellard, but is he involved in the project anymore? I wonder how he feels about this?

One Bad Fork Deserves Another...

Posted Jan 19, 2011 22:39 UTC (Wed) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link]

Fabrice also owns the trademark. http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html