A Group Of FFmpeg Developers Just Forked As Libav

[runeks]

This is a bad news. As there are good developers on both sides, would be better if they work together instead. Unfortunately looks they cannot do that anymore.

Or perhaps the fork has allowed them to continue to work on the project? Ie. they didn't want to work under the conditions that the ffmpeg project dictates, and thus a fork actually enables us to see the fruit of the work of these developers, instead of them leaving and having to start all over, or going their separate ways.

That's another, just as valid, way of looking at it if you ask me.

[energyman]

or group wants to become an oligarchy.
The rest of the devs reject them.
group goes away.

[Remco]

Forking is almost always bad, but the ability to fork is a good thing. It provides the balance of power that an open source project needs: dictator goes crazy, dictator goes away. Most of the time it prevents the dictator from going crazy in the first place.

[energyman]

Could someone please give me a clear explanation of what predicated this fork?

looks like a failed coupe and the people responsible for it moving to libav.

[Francesco Cosoleto]

This is a bad news. As there are good developers on both sides, would be better if they work together instead. Unfortunately looks they cannot do that anymore.

[MaestroMaus]

Forking isn't inherent good or bad. Let's hear the reason(s) first before complaining shall we?

[DeepDayze]

Of course without details we have no idea if there's good reason for a fork at the moment but your making a generalization here.
Some folks do seem to give new life and new blood to projects. Libreoffice and Xonotic spring to mind.

Libreoffice forked off from OpenOffice due to the unclear muddle brought on by Oracle after it acquired Sun and after the fork, LibreOffice has quite a bright future. Note that practically all of the original OpenOffice devs went over to the LibreOffice project as well

[Nevertime]

This, in my opinion, is the principle that has held the whole GNU/Linux progress back.
You disagree with the project's goals? Fork. You Disagree for the sake of disagreeing? Fork. You feel god and you think you could do a much better job than those who made the original piece of software, though it's completely untrue? Fork and let die.

Want to create more fragmentation? Fork.

This Fork, like many others, the only thing that will achieve is to reduce the man-power that could be devoted to one single project and create a lot of redundant work, leaving critical issues unattended or severely weakened.

Of course without details we have no idea if there's good reason for a fork at the moment but your making a generalization here.
Some folks do seem to give new life and new blood to projects. Libreoffice and Xonotic spring to mind.

[etnlWings]

Could someone please give me a clear explanation of what predicated this fork?

[rafirafi]

Ok, I thought it was that because libva claims the move is because of a name problem but you're certainly right.