As someone who uses FFMPEG heavily in a professional capacity, I really wish the various community leaders and contributors could come together and build better tools for everyone-- as opposed to the current status quo where both sides seem to spend a majority of their time attacking or defending each other.
It's like a "great filter" in the growth of open source projects, so many get ripped apart by their own internal power struggles, but those few that can make it past these hurdles really do shine.
From startups and public markets to open source projects and online communities, communication and collaboration are always the most difficult and rewarding piece of any human endeavor.
Never let the technical problems mask what really matters, where the real hard work comes in: people.
A a satisfied drive-by user of ffmpeg over the years I was not aware of any major forks or ffmpeg derivatives. What are the points of contention between the different forks ?
From what I understand, it was mainly the way Michael ran the project. Some developers tried to (forcefully) take over the project, but in the end they had to fork it. Here is a recent article with some comparisons, now that it's been four years https://lwn.net/Articles/650816/.
There are two questions now that Michael has left, will they still actively merge libav patches (which he was mainly doing), and will development continue at the same pace.
"It's not better, that's the reason everyone's been switching back.
The short version IIRC:
- Some people didn't like Niedermayer so they forked ffmpeg to libav
- Libav pulled some dirty tricks that pissed people off
-> They added an ffmpeg binary in their distribution that claimed ffmpeg was deprecated, while it wasn't
-> They managed to get the Debian ffmpeg packager on their side and get ffmpeg thrown out of Debian for a brand new fork (Which is really hard to do since Debian is nuts about stability) which gave them free marketshare for all debian, ubuntu etc derivatives
- Libav had an NIH problem leading them to build their own version of stuff ffmpeg already developed, while ffmpeg merged all of libav's changes back and ended up the superior project
- After years of complaining about how libav just doesn't work as well as ffmpeg, Debian finally squashes the flame war and moves back to ffmpeg with the rest of the linux world. Now libav is an inferior project that's also not in use anywhere
- From that email, it looks like libav threw a tantrum and made Niedermayer want to leave (Which is an ironic reversal of the original reason for the fork afaik)
Edit: As pointed out by /u/OrSpeeder libav also trademarked the FFmpeg logo and threatened to sue them if they didn't stop using their own logo.
I also remember that the naming was particularly (And potentially deliberately?) unfortunate as the ffmpeg project already consisted largely of AV libraries called... You guessed it: libav.
And as pointed out by /u/Kaligraphic it started with an attempted coup:
- removing access from everyone not involved with the coup and seizing the bug tracker, mailing lists, etc. and only forked when the ffmpeg team were able to restore ffmpeg.org."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981805