[FFmpeg-devel] Query from Reuters on XZ, open source, and Microsoft

[Tomas Härdin]

tis 2024-04-09 klockan 15:57 -0500 skrev Romain Beauxis:
> [Apologies for continuing the conversation, Rémi]
> 
> Le mar. 9 avr. 2024 à 14:05, Tomas Härdin <git at haerdin.se> a écrit :
> 
> > mån 2024-04-08 klockan 13:13 -0500 skrev Romain Beauxis:
> > > On Wed, Apr 3, 2024, 11:39 Kieran Kunhya via ffmpeg-devel <
> > > ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Hi Raphael,
> > > > 
> > > > I was the author of the tweet and I gave a short talk about
> > > > this
> > > > topic at
> > > > Demuxed at a video conference last year:
> > > > https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OIyOEuQQsCQ&t=930s
> > > > 
> > > > That said this is a community project and it would be best to
> > > > continue the
> > > > discussion on this mailing list unless agreed otherwise.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Thank you for sharing your talk. It's indeed unfortunate that
> > > large
> > > companies are not more generous with the projects they depend on
> > > _heavily_
> > > 
> > > I would like to offer a constructive feedback really not intended
> > > as
> > > trolling. I believe that supporting a more modern development
> > > workflow such
> > > as the GitHub PR or gitlab MR would go very long way in helping
> > > onboarding
> > > new developers.
> > 
> > Considering which company owns GitHub and which company was the
> > target
> > of Kieran's criticism, this seems ill-adviced
> > 
> 
> Would you mind explaining what you mean exactly? I want to respond
> but I'm
> not sure if I fully understand your point here.

Microsoft owns Github. I think it would be foolish to make ourselves
beholden to Microsoft, for reasons that I hope should be obvious.

> > Also as someone who had to maintain a Gitlab instance at uni for a
> > couple of years, I agree with Rémi's points
> > 
> 
> My initial contribution was motivated by the argument presented in
> the
> original talk that bringing new blood is critical to the survival of
> the
> project.
> 
> If so, then I do believe that there must be a compromise to be made
> between
> being easier to join for new developers and changing the existing
> workflow.
> I'm also aware that changing the existing workflow has been discussed
> before.

FFmpeg is far from the only project using an email driven workflow.
Linux comes to mind. I don't buy arguments from network effects.
Subscribing to a mailing list isn't hard.

/Tomas