MPlayer - Monday 18.4.2011 I will stop providing any service to MPlayer | Hacker News Reader

MPlayer - Monday 18.4.2011 I will stop providing any service to MPlayer

lists.mplayerhq.hu

143 pointsUncle_Sam22 comments

This has a surprising score, implying that I should care. I hate to be that guy, but why should I care about this? There's no context or overview of the ramifications of this. By all appearances this is people being morons to each other on mailing lists (nothing new, particularly on -dev lists), and typically this kind of drama has absolutely no bearing on anything outside of the project...

A casual Google leads me to this, which continues to paint a nope, not interested saga for me: http://lwn.net/Articles/424050/

(Edit: The author of that URL is somehow associated with MPlayer -- he seems to do documentation. There is an interview of him on the MPlayer Web site[1]. With that in mind, discovering that he called Ted T'so a "[L]inux-loving manwhore" and a racial slur on his blog[2], I'm now even more disinterested in the entire MPlayer development team and their comings and goings. What a classy bunch.

[1]: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design5/interview-gabucino.html

[2]: http://gabucino.be/files/ted-tso-followup.html )

Flame wars apart, blog of a linux-loving manwhore, and other comments on your first link are atrocious! No wonder people are leaving.

I made the mistake of clicking a link on the blog and...

Now that Reiser is in jail for slaughtering his whiny bitch wife, someone really had to step in and fill the gap in the long line of psychopathic linux developers.

So I'll just forget this person exists. Shame on anyone who gives him a public forum.

yes, this kind of people are part of why Attila leaves MPlayer...

Possibly not so serious:

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2011-Apr...

There's a couple other replies in the thread but it is unclear exactly what happened. Apparently some bad blood over him redirecting ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu to libav.org instead of ffmpeg.org.

Is this related to the libav/ffmpeg dustup from a few months ago? (see here: http://lwn.net/Articles/433347/ )

Seems to be a lot of drama in the open source codec space, and I'm really not sure who is on what side or what the issues at stake are.

Anyone care to explain what's going on?

This announcement has its roots in the FFmpeg/libav fork. For a long time, FFmpeg resources were hosted on the MPlayer server. (Not sure if they still are; its git has been migrated to videolan at least.)

Like a number of OSS devs, people on both sides of the fork share traits of being a) brilliant hackers, b) stubborn and c) prone to mannerisms that people may interpret as rude or inflammatory, whether intentional or not.

I for one am sad to see this whole fork happen. If it were driven by interests pursuing divergent goals, then that's understandable, but this fork is purely politics. Codec development is already an arcane art, and there are dozens of RE'd (or poorly documented) codecs in the FFmpeg codebase. Splitting up development and maintenance effort is not going to help anybody in this case.

Yes, it looks like the admin of mplayerhq.hu sided with libav in the fork and someone on the other side got pissed.

There was an article linked from ffmpeg.org that seems to have a lot of information, especially in the comments there.

http://lwn.net/Articles/423702/

Could someone please explain what this means? What kind of service is that particular server providing? I thought that MPlayer is a software project, not a service provider.

I guess it's things like the main website, issue trackers, downloads hosting, community and such for the project. A large part of the identity of a project.

Some typical children like crying and unability to sort out things like grown ups? Atleast from the mail thread i am wondering what this is about..

This is terrifying. I wonder what the threat said.

What's terrifying to me is the dilution of the meaning of the word "terrifying." I see it on this site in response to the most minor of occurrences.

What's terrifying about this is that it sounds like a participator in the project is effectively stopping simply because of a legal threat.

How is this not terrifying to you?

It means that our legal system is completely broken.

This is actually kindof an open ended question. My response was downvoted to -3, which generally means somebody has said something stupid. Am I missing something here? Do most people honestly think that this is an acceptable practice?

Okay, honestly, blatant misuse of our legal system being used to pressure somebody out of a project is a misuse of the word terrifying, but using the word to describe the misuse is a proper use of it?

That's terrifying.

Read the mail again. He wrote that he got used to ignore corporate legal threats. What caused how to leave the project was not the threat itself but the fact that he got it from other members of the project whom he's working together with voluntarily in his free time..

People get threatened with lawsuits all the time. What matters is when they actually get filed.

This person is leaving the project not due to the threat of a lawsuit, but because of who threatened -- other project members. This isn't a case of a legal system run amuck, it's a case of overkill when asking someone to leave a project.

1. How do you know it is being misused? There could be a legitimate legal complaint here.

2. How does a legal threat indicate that the legal system is broken? People disagree on matters of the law all the time. There is nothing terrifying about that.

3. How expensive is this threat likely to be? Desist from whatever the other person is threatening you over, or else if you have the right to do it spend a few hundred dollars getting a lawyer to write a counter-notice. It's not that big of a deal.

4. This follows an incident where someone who might have done something slightly foolish or contentious surrounding a trademark or copyrighted work. Since I don't tend to do contentious things in this arena, I'm very unlikely to ever be the target of a legal threat like this. Even if I did, how many people do such things and never get threatened? I suspect many. If the cost of getting threatened is low, the odds of getting threatened are even lower. How could I possibly be terrified of something unlikely to ever affect me?

So, yeah, even after your response I still think the use of the word "terrifying" in this context is quite foolish.

It's a bit strange, if you read the follow on thread the person who presumably sent the email claims he did not make any legal threats, and his email was merely "abrasive".

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2011-Apr...

I have no idea where the right or wrong in this lies.

I see no claims nor indications that Michael Niedermayer sent legal threats.

very unfortunate to see a mature open source project collapsing

What I gather from the emails and other public postings of people involved with the project, 'mature' is not exactly how I would describe it.

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