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Comment by av500 | Hacker News Reader

"...and its very difficult to be the leader when one is on one side of this split and the other tries everything to push me out..."

that the gist of it, it's always the other side wanting him harm. he never ever acknowleged any wrongdoing on his side.

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The libav side have consistently refused to merge code from the ffmpeg side of the split, including security fixes, have written their own incompatible versions of any APIs the ffmpeg developers come up with, and been generally hostile, and he's the one that's had to deal with the mess for the past several years.

"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.

Libav is about rules and not leaders.

After seeing a few of the comments from libav developers here and on IRC, you can see the bitterness is still alive. :-(

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.

I've never heard of this split up until today, why are you still salty? You won, you can take over the world now.

Your users don't care about rules, and rules need manpower.

If your rules prevent you from keeping your software secure, you don't have enough manpower to do what is in your user's best interests.

As far as I can tell, libav is the one with the rules and multiple developers. And now ffmpeg is the one with no rules and zero developers?

I don't know if he's ever explicitly mentioned his "wrongdoings," but I do feel that he has changed for the better since the libav split. This is in terms of how he's interacted with people on the ffmpeg-devel mailing list, he's shown up consistently on IRC, and getting patches accepted aren't a royal pain as it was in the past. I don't know how real contributors/maintainers feel, but as a user and sometimes patch-submitter, I feel like things have gotten better.

You're doing a pretty good job of illustrating why things went off the rails.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/13099...

posts like this one is why it went off the rails a long time ago. there is also the one where he suggested a libav dev should commit suicide and later labeled it as "Austrian humour"

Honest series of questions from an outsider:

Your team won, Michael stepped down. Of his own volition. What positive outcome could possibly be had by still spouting bitterness and negativity against him? Is it because he did not genuinely say "sorry" at some point? After reading [0] and [1], is it not possible to admit that maybe both sides have some genuine "sorries" to pass around? Now seems like the perfect opportunity to make a positive change for developers and users instead of venting frustrations that are only going to further polarize the current division.

(I'm not "automatically" labelling your posts as bitter. Almost all of yours in these comments objectively contain negative language, typically directed at Michael.)

[0] http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-January/106403...

[1] http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-January/106489...

Edit, to add:

I guess I echo this sentiment (from article's email chain): http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2015-July/176493.ht...

https://blogs.gentoo.org/lu_zero/2015/02/20/demotivation-fud...

For the another batch of links and some more background.

That also is not a derogatory remark. Protective and one-sided, but not derogatory.

You can't claim that everyone that disagrees with you is being "derogatory".

EDIT: Example:

"I disagree with you" = not derogatory

"You're an idiot" = derogatory

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/13099...

Enough said.

I'm pretty sure I can dig up comments like this from both sides from 4 years ago, especially from IRC logs.

please find a mailing list post where Michael is being attacked like that.

You are welcome to do.

Libav has a code of conduct and it is enforced so maybe you'd have much an harder time finding such gems.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/17927...

(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 that the line you're objecting to?

That sounds kind of jokey and affectionate to me.

Seriously, people on HN are enraptured when Linus Torvalds writes things that are about eight billion times more personally hostile than that.

>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.

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