I'm not sure why this is posted here, but please note that this was written more than 10 years ago, and a lot of things changed since then. It's important to take this article from an historical perspective, keeping in mind that it was written by someone with "interests" in the matter (as much as I wanted to be objective, let's not lie to ourselves, I was a FFmpeg developer first). The popularity of this article played an important role in "public's opinion" (it's my most popular article ever).
Nowadays, even though I've been distant to the project for years now, I can say the situation changed in a good way (from my perspective). The projects are unified again because people from both sides made difficult compromises. I think it would make sense to focus on how the issue was resolved rather that why it was so bad. This fire is extinguished, let's work on keeping things as peaceful as we can.
For the record, I mostly left FFmpeg development years ago. And while it wasn't the only factor, the merge effort and overall tension actually drained me pretty badly at that time. Of course, this is also true for several people from both sides, and surprising to no one the project(s) lost many developers in the process.
The multimedia community is plagued with drama like this, but this one was particularly destructive. We can certainly take lessons from this, but I'll leave that to the historians.