LWN: Comments on "FFmpeg fork becomes libav"

FFmpeg fork becomes libav

BradReed — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:26:34 +0000

There is a comment on the fork at http://ffmpeg.org/

March 15, 2011

FFmpeg has been forked by some developers after their attempted takeover[1] two months ago did not fully succeed. During these two months their repository was listed here as main FFmpeg repository. We corrected this now and list the actual main repository and theirs directly below. All improvements of their fork have been merged into the main repository already.

Sadly we lost a not so minor part of our infrastructure to the forking side. We are still in the process of recovering, but web, git and issue tracker are already replaced.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

job — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:49:24 +0000

Another example of this is Joomla. Who remembers Mambo anymore?

When the developers are gone, it is just a matter of time before the old trademark is worthless.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

jubal — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:00:31 +0000

OK, so I went through the mailing lists

I wouldn't count on the coup leaders' ability to manage a project much; all of this has all signs of power struggle rather than anything else. Specifically:

there are no governance rules set for the new project (aside from the committers are gods and admins are Gods)
there are no measurable goals given,
coup members' communication style still needs some improvement to reach the level of a very impatient high school bully,
their middle- and long-term planning ability seems to be rather non-existent

On the other hand, the drama is of exquisite mud-slinging kindergarten-quality.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

salimma — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:07:58 +0000

For any project small enough not to have a legal body put in charge, it's probably quite common that the initial leader owns the domain, and any coup attempt would have to find another name.

FFmpeg fork becomes libav

rathann — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:38:59 +0000

As someone has said already: scorched earth tactics. But don't worry, the original mailing lists will most certainly be picked up on ffmpeg.org.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

iive — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:23:59 +0000

@jubal,
You are absolutely right. This is exactly what happened.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

DonDiego — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:15:53 +0000

> It is kinda crappy that ffmpeg has to be copied verbatim for every project that uses it, because it has no real stable releases whatsoever.

FFmpeg (now libav) has had stable releases since March 2009.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

donbarry — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 02:20:29 +0000

Or the fiasco of the TWiki.org siteholder taking the trademark
and domain ownership bat and beating the developers over the
head of it, leading the great bulk of developers to found Foswiki.

That's the problem with forced renames, a lot of traction is
found in names which have existed for a while -- two years after
that fork a lot of people still don't know the bulk of the
developer community went into forced exile, because you'll
never find a mention of it on the original site, and it never
got the sort of coverage which *fortunately* the Hudson/Jenkins fiasco
got, and which enabled the vast majority of casual devs, and
even casual users, to start tracking to the successor name.

Of course, the value of an established moniker is one thing that
occasionally encourages someone to make a grab, if it's unprotected,
held by a different structure than the community, or some develop
starry $$$ symbols in their eyes.

FFmpeg fork becomes libav

jengelh — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:23:21 +0000

You think like git. For one, it is an add-delete, for the other, it is a rename ;-)

FFmpeg fork becomes libav

gmaxwell — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 21:53:57 +0000

Is it right to call it a fork when they're shutting down all the resources (mailing list, bug tracker, etc) after moving them to the new name?

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-Mar...

Sounds like a rename to me.

FFmpeg fork becomes libav

guinan — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 21:17:26 +0000

It started out separate.

My impression is that MPlayer was the biggest user, so they kind of adopted it.

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20010218084709/http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg#History

FFmpeg fork becomes libav

alvieboy — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:44:31 +0000

I've some questions, perhaps some of you might enlighten me.

I always assumed "ffmpeg" was a part of mplayer, and was developed in conjunction with it. It looks like I was mistaken, although some devs work in both projects. Is this the situation ?

Is (or was) A'rpi (the original mplayer dev) also a contributor of ffmpeg ? I remember a long time ago he objecting the use of shared libraries on mplayer due to performance issues.

I once contributed a few short patches to mplayer - now I'm wondering if they were somehow moved to any mplayer-derived project. Not that I'd have a problem with it, just curiosity.

Alvaro

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

robswain — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:48:17 +0000

The libav maintainers are the same group that initiated the takeover.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

foom — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:54:37 +0000

Seems kinda like the fork of Hudson to Jenkins that took practically the entire community of developers with it (including the founder, in that case!) leaving behind only Oracle.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

Frej — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:28:23 +0000

Given it is ronald butlje and the naming of the new project is prefixed 'lib', it's likely he will achieve what distroes and users need in a shared library. It is kinda crappy that ffmpeg has to be copied verbatim for every project that uses it, because it has no real stable releases whatsoever.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

jubal — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:18:47 +0000

for a member of the uninformed public (i.e. me) it looks like the people behind the fork failed to secure the ownership of the ffmpeg.org domain before they executed the coup and now have been forced to rename their fork; I really hope that the whole thing is worth the amounts of drama it generates

MythTV/git

elanthis — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:10:34 +0000

Incompetence.

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

david.a.wheeler — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:26:21 +0000

At least according to one post, there is an FFmpeg fork, and that fork is named "libav", which is not the same thing as "the group of developers who took over maintainership of the FFmpeg project some months ago". Like all forks, we'll have to see which one manages to carry on long term. I'd love to hear what's really going on here, e.g., who are the sides and why the fork creators believe there needs to be a fork. Presumably it's because of difficulty working together, since the fork's mission statement focused on "each individual's good behavior and intolerance of bad behavior, mutual respect, active and positive reviewing of submissions and other policies and processes targeted at conserving this environment."

MythTV/git

njd27 — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:23:58 +0000

Can anyone clarify what the problems with git that the mythtv project has been having are?

LWN: Comments on "FFmpeg fork becomes libav"

FFmpeg fork becomes libav

It's a *fork* of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

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MythTV/git

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MythTV/git

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

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It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav

It's a fork of FFmpeg that is becoming libav