Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 13, 2015 22:37 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977)
Parent article: Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Michael Niedermayer essentially beats the fork--this is a great example of how to win in the presence of a hostile fork.

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 14, 2015 21:20 UTC (Tue) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course, any reasonably successful project has a built-in defense against hostile forks: name recognition. This is sort of like the incumbent issue in politics; people are more likely to go with the names they recognize, unless there are *strong* reasons to do otherwise. Hostile forks that actually go on to displace the original are rare indeed. The few that do often involve broad community outrage with the original (e.g. Xfree86 v Xorg), or indisputable and incontrovertible success (GCC v EGCS, although that one eventually ended with a friendly merge).

So winning in the presence of a hostile fork basically involves not sucking *too* much more than the fork. You don't even have to be better (assuming you had some success before the fork). You just have to be tolerable, and people will likely stick with what they know. So it's not really *that* impressive a feat.

(If you're going to do it, though, winning over major distros based on technical merit, as FFmpeg seems to have done in this case, is definitely one of the best ways to do it.) :)

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 15, 2015 9:33 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

So winning in the presence of a hostile fork basically involves not sucking *too* much more than the fork. You don't even have to be better (assuming you had some success before the fork). You just have to be tolerable, and people will likely stick with what they know. So it's not really *that* impressive a feat.

The best example of that is probably OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice. LibreOffice is arguably the better program, but especially on Windows, people will still install OpenOffice because that is the name they know. (On Linux, LibreOffice seems to be more popular because most people get it from their distributions, which for the most part jumped ship from OpenOffice to LibreOffice even before OpenOffice became an Apache project.)

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 23, 2015 13:39 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

> name recognition.

This is a good point.

Before I knew anything else about the situation, I was often surprised to find the following banner printed when I ran the ffmpeg binary on a Debian system:

> *** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED ***
> This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.

This was puzzling, and misleading because ffmpeg was not deprecated, per se; but the libav implementation of the ffmpeg binary was planned to be removed. This was aa watered down version of an earlier warning:

> This program is not developed anymore and is only
> provided for compatibility. Use avconv instead

Which IMHO was even more misleading.

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 21, 2015 8:14 UTC (Tue) by KotH (guest, #4660) [Link] (8 responses)

The way this "hostile" fork has been won, was simply by two things:

1) Merge everything they make.
Yes. ffmpeg merges every and each commit to libav (with a dozen or so notable exceptions in the last 4 years). Which makes ffmpeg actually downstream of libav. This can also be seen in the commit numbers, the top 4 "contributors" to ffmpeg are, beside Michael, people who work on libav and left ffmpeg because of Michael. The huge number of commits Michael has, is largely inflated by the daily merges of libav code he makes, and the many little fixes those merges need.

2) Continous smear campaign.
Even though ffmpeg largely depends on libav for development, ffmpeg has been always badmouthing libav in all kinds of ways. From "they don't fix security issues" to plain old "their code is shit". This has been discussed as the videolan developer days a few times, but were never actually addressed by the ffmpeg developers responsible.

And for those who claim that ffmpeg is better/more secure/whatever, why then does VLC stick to libav, if ffmpeg is so much better?

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 21, 2015 14:50 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

This whole line of reasoning is a bunch of baloney right on the face of it, I'm not intimately familiar with the personalities and code between ffmpeg and libav but this is just blatantly wrong.

The "merge everything they make" activity could flow both ways, both projects have the opportunity to merge each others changes, if the policy of merging most of the libav changes into ffmpeg has made ffmpeg a stronger software then it's libav policy against merging ffmpeg changes which has made them the weaker project.

As far as any negative criticism of libav being due to some Internet-wide smear campaign, wow, that justification is basically never right, the universe does not revolve around the petty differences of a couple of folks, I can't imagine that most people who ship either library really cares about the split, they just want something that works, so the idea that a "smear campaign" could gain any traction is laughable. Ha ha ha. This is especially true for Google which is spending their time and money to fuzz test this software, which is an incredible gift, and has real metrics to back their statements, not whispers.

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 21, 2015 20:35 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (4 responses)

>Even though ffmpeg largely depends on libav for development, ffmpeg has been always badmouthing libav in all kinds of ways. From "they don't fix security issues" to plain old "their code is shit".

Do you have any citations to back that up? Because I've seen libav doing an order of magnitude more smearing, up to and including sending fraudulent legal threats over the logo, claiming ffmpeg "steals" code, distributing a fake ffmpeg scareware binary, posts like yours, and so on.

Regarding security, libav makes regular appearances on the security updates page on this site - often for ffmpeg CVEs dated 3-4 years ago. The opposite has never occurred.

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 29, 2015 13:54 UTC (Wed) by lu_zero (guest, #72556) [Link] (3 responses)

Please provide links to corroborate your statement.

Nobody in Libav ever discussed FFmpeg beside me on here

https://blogs.gentoo.org/lu_zero/2015/02/20/demotivation-...

Let alone "smear".

On the other side, at least few of the the new people contributing to Libav got quite interesting emails from Michael Niedermayer and Carl Eugen Hoyos. (I can say few since they did ask me what the hell was it about, I have no way to know if ALL the new contributors got this kind of interesting service).

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 30, 2015 18:02 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

Sure, here's one: https://lwn.net/Articles/652736/

FFmpeg has been professionally silent on public forums. Your side would do well to learn from their example.

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 31, 2015 20:46 UTC (Fri) by lu_zero (guest, #72556) [Link] (1 responses)

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/13... professionally.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/17... silent.

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Aug 1, 2015 17:56 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I'm sure I could go rooting through 4 years of your own project's mailing lists and blogs to dig up similar dirt if I were so inclined.

The point is I don't have to.

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Jul 31, 2015 16:15 UTC (Fri) by gabucino (guest, #72504) [Link]

Out of pure curiosity: when was the last time you (accidentally) spoke the truth?

Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

Posted Oct 19, 2015 12:59 UTC (Mon) by turbulens (guest, #104984) [Link]

If you see the "About" section on VLC, you'll see they give credit to FFmpeg. They use FFmpeg too. I don't understand your means by "stick to Libav" .