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I mean it kinda depends on who you consider the abrasive guy. In my experience just like with linux a lot of the ffmpeg/mplayer folks were abrasive. Sometimes i

I mean it kinda depends on who you consider the abrasive guy. In my experience just like with linux a lot of the ffmpeg/mplayer folks were abrasive. Sometimes it bothers me sometimes is doesn't. Michael Niedermayer was the maintainer and a guy who did crazy amounts of work on ffmpeg. But he was also what seemed to be the BDFL. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but it seems like there was sort of a coup that took over development. Then the Michael Niedermayer side took back control and the group that took over ffmpeg abdicated power over ffmpeg and its brand and moved to a fork. It's actually interesting how hard it is to get a simple timeline of events. But some information is in the following thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20120511022506/http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-March/109207.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120511022506/http://lists.mpla...

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> Then the Michael Niedermayer side took back control and the group that took over ffmpeg abdicated power over ffmpeg and its brand and moved to a fork. Once again, no, it’s not what happened. A team forked but failed to gain significant traction and the original project is now the only one remaining. The email you quote comes from just before the fork. Niedermayer was the main maintainer of ffmpeg and as stated there was disagreement between him and what became the libav developers about the possibility of adding new features while improving the code. The libav team wanted to fully focus on code improvement and left in a very vocal and really obnoxious way. As anyone could have predicted history showed the they were wrong. It was completely possible to do both new features and code improvement at the same time. Niedermayer resigned in 2015 because the way the fork was handled had made things painful for him which I fully respect.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  You can say no it's not what happened happened all you want. But here's the announcement from the libav side[1]. It was definitely not a friendly fork. There was clearly a dispute and the Niedermayer side won[2], which led to the fork. But either way Niedermayer was basically BDFL since he took over from Fabrice Bellard until he resigned. That is ultimately one of the things that led to the dispute. Much like what happened between vim and neovim. Although the disagreements between Bram and the neovim team were a lot more friendly. I'm not sure which part you disagree with, since you clearly seem to be saying the same thing with respect to who forked what. And one of the big fundamental differences between ffmpeg/libav and thunderbird/betterbird is that the Niedermayer side still merged in a lot of changes from libav, leading to an overall better product than libav, whereas thunderbird does not at all follow the same behaviour WRT betterbird. They have ridiculous bugs that had for decades and as much as I try to like it I can't for the life of me for example understand how they have an open request for a search that doesn't end up in that stupid filter view instead of just showing all results. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161107163133/http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/129579 https://web.archive.org/web/20161107163133/http://article.gm... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120510045810/http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-March/109251.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120510045810/http://lists.mpla...
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    I had misunderstood your first paragraph and thought you were implying that the fork got the brand after Niedermayer resigned. Reading carefully I know realise it’s not what you wrote. We are indeed in agreement.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

> Then the Michael Niedermayer side took back control and the group that took over ffmpeg abdicated power over ffmpeg and its brand and moved to a fork. Once again, no, it’s not what happened. A team forked but failed to gain significant traction and the original project is now the only one remaining. The email you quote comes from just before the fork. Niedermayer was the main maintainer of ffmpeg and as stated there was disagreement between him and what became the libav developers about the possibility of adding new features while improving the code. The libav team wanted to fully focus on code improvement and left in a very vocal and really obnoxious way. As anyone could have predicted history showed the they were wrong. It was completely possible to do both new features and code improvement at the same time. Niedermayer resigned in 2015 because the way the fork was handled had made things painful for him which I fully respect.

rjzzleep 4y ago
You can say no it's not what happened happened all you want. But here's the announcement from the libav side[1]. It was definitely not a friendly fork. There was clearly a dispute and the Niedermayer side won[2], which led to the fork. But either way Niedermayer was basically BDFL since he took over from Fabrice Bellard until he resigned. That is ultimately one of the things that led to the dispute. Much like what happened between vim and neovim. Although the disagreements between Bram and the neovim team were a lot more friendly. I'm not sure which part you disagree with, since you clearly seem to be saying the same thing with respect to who forked what. And one of the big fundamental differences between ffmpeg/libav and thunderbird/betterbird is that the Niedermayer side still merged in a lot of changes from libav, leading to an overall better product than libav, whereas thunderbird does not at all follow the same behaviour WRT betterbird. They have ridiculous bugs that had for decades and as much as I try to like it I can't for the life of me for example understand how they have an open request for a search that doesn't end up in that stupid filter view instead of just showing all results. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161107163133/http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/129579 https://web.archive.org/web/20161107163133/http://article.gm... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120510045810/http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-March/109251.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120510045810/http://lists.mpla...
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  I had misunderstood your first paragraph and thought you were implying that the fork got the brand after Niedermayer resigned. Reading carefully I know realise it’s not what you wrote. We are indeed in agreement.