I had never heard of any of this mess until today, don't particularly care about either project, but this comes across as extremely biased, even from the most basic aspect of tone.
>former FFmpeg leader Michael Niedermayer.
Former? Well, he resigned today, but this blog seems quite old.
>Since FFmpeg was a project famous for horrid code quality and sketchy and irregular API
Was it? Is it? All I know is a bunch of stuff uses it. Where is that fame?
>“The people behind Libav stole the FFmpeg infrastructure”, some of the admins even got questioned in their workplace if they really stole something. Pity that most of the people related in keeping the infrastructure functional were doing so on their own hardware and co-location, but obviously checking facts is hard, better go help shoveling manure on people.
Server infrastructure is one thing. You mention yourself that you guys didn't have the trademark, yet you took the domain name too? I dunno about the laws in all of the locations where this played out, but in the US at least, that'd be theft.
>started to merge daily everything Libav does more or less since the beginning, making FFmpeg effectively a strict derivative of Libav.
Again, tone, wording, etc. This statement does not stand on its own: If I have a 50 million line project that had a small subsection forked, and every day the fork's changes were merged, that does not make my project a strict derivative. I'm not saying libav is a small subsection, or making any sort of claim about the ratio of ffmpeg original work vs. libav merges, but you have provided zero information or evidence to support the claim one way or the other either.
>Now things are a little more fair and at least FFmpeg more or less states that is a derivative of Libav with additional features in their download page.
Ah, here you go. Kinda. But again, tone. And not much evidence. The ffmpeg download page seems to be open about including code from libav, but uh, additional features could be major. What's the difference in features? What is the actual volume of work in comparison?
>On the other hand I’m not cool at all in having an unfair competition, with a side piggy-backing on the other like it is happening: everything in Libav is merged inf FFmpeg, enjoying the fact the code is polished and cleaned before.
This is a feature, not a bug. Unfair competition? Piggy backing? You are developing an open source project. Do you only want things to be open if the people using it are people you like?
>sometimes the amount of nonsense thrown at you by those rabid fans not knowing anything is appalling.
You write this, and immediately follow with:
>Hopefully writing more about it might help defusing this situation.
Blog posts like this are very inflammatory. You hurl insults, make a lot of claims without providing evidence that backs them, and generally come across as someone who has a lot of personal bias on the matter.
That isn't to say that you're wrong: I have no idea who is right or wrong on this. I don't particularly care. But your blog post is about as biased as it gets. And to note, biased doesn't necessarily mean wrong - you can be biased and still be right.
> Former? Well, he resigned today, but this blog seems quite old.
He got demoted, as written in the blog post, did you read it with attention or you just went through looking for bits you could use?
> Was it? Is it? All I know is a bunch of stuff uses it. Where is that fame?
You can ask the GStreamer people or the VLC people, I started being involved in MPlayer and FFmpeg because the code was not really working on PPC...
> Server infrastructure is one thing. You mention yourself that you guys didn't have the trademark, yet you took the domain name too? I dunno about the laws in all of the locations where this played out, but in the US at least, that'd be theft.
We did not took the domain, the owner of the trademark is not Michael Niedermayer.
You claim to know nothing yet you cut quite interesting judgement and you cherry pick in a quite interesting way.
>He got demoted, as written in the blog post, did you read it with attention or you just went through looking for bits you could use?
It certainly seems like he had been leading the ffmpeg project until his resignation.
As for looking for bits I could use, I am quite specifically responding to your question about how the article comes across as biased. I was not looking for parts that seemed unbiased, because you were looking for the biased parts.
>We did not took the domain, the owner of the trademark is not Michael Niedermayer
Your own blog post says " the trademark FFmpeg had been given by the owner of it Fabrice Bellard to the former FFmpeg leader Michael Niedermayer"
Which is it? You say in your post he was given the trademark.
>You claim to know nothing yet you cut quite interesting judgement and you cherry pick in a quite interesting way.
You're defensive. You asked a question about how your article was biased. As an outsider, these are the parts that looked biased.
If you ask a question, you can reasonably expect an answer. If you don't want an answer, don't ask the question.
>"insults" is a quite loaded term btw.
Uh. Thanks for informing me, I guess? I'm not sure how you can in other places say "clean up monkey" is horribly offensive, but "rabid fan" is not an insult at all.
I doubt HN is a bastion of ffmpeg supremacists, and there's no organized movement to suppress your voice, so the reaction your getting should probably be taken as an indication that you should undergo some self introspection. Open source projects depend on community support to exist. Libav may be the best thing since sliced bread, but if you drive away potential users and supporters, you are harming the chances of the project's success.
> Former? Well, he resigned today, but this blog seems quite old.
In context he may consider the vote to keep Michael Niedermayer as team lead a farce. Several of the voters mentioned that they only voted for him to enjoy the resulting drama.
> This is a feature, not a bug. Unfair competition? Piggy backing? You are developing an open source project.
There is hate between the projects. libav was (iirc) started with the intent to be ffmpeg done right, something that is hard to show when the ffmpeg maintainers can simply copy paste every improvement until libav collapses from lack of support/donations.
Not going to take a side in this either, there seemed to be a need to grow up in both groups.
(Keep in mind at least one of the Libav supported got questioned on his dayjob regarding "thievery" because of those lovely examples and the legends the fans kept propagating)
>If noone has time ill fix the memleak and commit and let the libav
cleanup monkeys clean the rest up for me.
Is the kind of inflammatory comment you are so up in arms over, I think you must have lived a very sheltered life. Especially considering this comment looks to have come shortly after the hostile split.
"Refused" ? In Libav any patch has to go through review, anything that had been put in review had been managed as any other patches by any other sources.
if everything that somebody from the libav side says here is automatically labelled bitterness and downvoted, maybe you can understand why some are indeed bitter.
For the another batch of links and some more background.