Now, that I got people talking...

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 7:14 PM, Ricardo Garcia <rick.g777 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally, I think stopping ffmpeg development for 2, 3 or even 6
> months to do a code restructuring is indeed worth it (the mozilla guys
> did it, and now we have Firefox thanks to them). Perhaps it would be
> nice to ask the ffmpeg devs again, who knows? It might just work -
> specially coming from the Fedora marketing team ;-)

If you want to step up and help them change to be more compatible with
our policy, you are welcome to do that.  But you sure as hell better
not walk into their process telling them what they do sucks.  You MUST
approach the conversation without judgment or blame and you must do
what you can to show that you are serious about doing the hard work
necessary to help them restructure in a way that is compatible with
our policy so that our users can benefit from their work.

We can not blame them for not caring about what we care about.
Everyone works on projects for their own reasons. If they don't care
about the issues of patent encumbrance or API stability, that does not
devalue the work they do. They simply have different interests.  What
matters is if  that their project structure is open enough to include
new people with new interests who are willing to work in good faith to
make ffmpeg easier to use and distribute.  And we aren't going to find
that out if people want into their process telling them what they are
doing is wrong.  It's not wrong, its just not what we need. So we need
people in our community who have the development skills, and a civil
tongue, to offer to help them make ffmpeg a better fit for our needs
in a way, for the greater benefit of all.


-jef