ffmpeg coup
Backstory
Let’s fly back to 2004. Those were the days: MPlayer basks in her full glory, being by far the best UNIX media player (for some, even on Windows), there is no Bubuntu flying around everywhere yet, and without the innovative iPhone paving the way nobody thinks that a UNIX could be the basis of a viable mobile platform (yay, sucky Yopy). All things considered, peace reigns.
Except for the fact that a danish company, KiSS Tech. takes subreader.c from MPlayer (coded by a fellow hungarian called laaz), and sells it in a nice videoplayer set-top-box. Following my negotiations, the Core Team and KiSS - in one of the first GPL-related copyright cases - reached an out of court settlement: KiSS would remove the aforementioned code snippet, and compensate us for the damage.
This is the point where our favorite coup d’état guys (Attila Kinali and Diego Biurrun) decided that they were unjustly left out. Of course they were, being the RMS’ish shady backstabbers they are. They subsequently rallied some people under their flag, and after a vote, they demanded that I hand over the legal matters. As it turns out, these babbling idiots would have wanted to sue the company, despite the fact that laaz, the code author has already agreed to a settlement.
With MPlayer being the desolate, unfunny place without A’rpi (he left the project months ago, because these morons were impossible to work with), I decided to do the next YAML (Yet Another MPlayer Leaving).
Naturally, KiSS detected the amount of bullshit flowing around, and ignored Diego’s (the new legal rep) mails happily ever after. No compensation for MPlayer, so long suckers!
... and back in 2011
These very same two guys decided to do another coup (this act is henceforth known as “pulling a Diego”), this time at ffmpeg. For the less educated masses out there: ffmpeg (and opensource MPEG4/DivX/etc decoding in general) was made possible in great part by two people: Fabrice Bellard the genius french mathematician programmer, and Michael Niedermayer, the... oh whatever, the codec god.
Guess which two people were recently proclaimed persona non grata by two jacobin rebels.
To add insult to the injury, it has been recently revealed that Niedermayer wrote a will in the past years, which - in case of his death - ordered all his IT stuff to be given to these very same backstabbers: Attila, and Diego. :(
Presently the project’s two “expert maintainers” (Michael’s words:) are these two part-time ubuntu admin kids... who are completely oblivious to the fact that the hijacked domain (AND the ffmpeg trademark, say hello to Mr. Lawsuit) still belongs to Fabrice. Guaranteed lulz will ensue shortly.
UPDATE: after I published this entry, Attila Kinali (on behalf of the whole FFmpeg!) has contacted my ISP (and my own company), requesting my block. Failed big time.
Let’s fly back to 2004. Those were the days: MPlayer basks in her full glory, being by far the best UNIX media player (for some, even on Windows), there is no Bubuntu flying around everywhere yet, and without the innovative iPhone paving the way nobody thinks that a UNIX could be the basis of a viable mobile platform (yay, sucky Yopy). All things considered, peace reigns.
Except for the fact that a danish company, KiSS Tech. takes subreader.c from MPlayer (coded by a fellow hungarian called laaz), and sells it in a nice videoplayer set-top-box. Following my negotiations, the Core Team and KiSS - in one of the first GPL-related copyright cases - reached an out of court settlement: KiSS would remove the aforementioned code snippet, and compensate us for the damage.
This is the point where our favorite coup d’état guys (Attila Kinali and Diego Biurrun) decided that they were unjustly left out. Of course they were, being the RMS’ish shady backstabbers they are. They subsequently rallied some people under their flag, and after a vote, they demanded that I hand over the legal matters. As it turns out, these babbling idiots would have wanted to sue the company, despite the fact that laaz, the code author has already agreed to a settlement.
With MPlayer being the desolate, unfunny place without A’rpi (he left the project months ago, because these morons were impossible to work with), I decided to do the next YAML (Yet Another MPlayer Leaving).
Naturally, KiSS detected the amount of bullshit flowing around, and ignored Diego’s (the new legal rep) mails happily ever after. No compensation for MPlayer, so long suckers!
... and back in 2011
These very same two guys decided to do another coup (this act is henceforth known as “pulling a Diego”), this time at ffmpeg. For the less educated masses out there: ffmpeg (and opensource MPEG4/DivX/etc decoding in general) was made possible in great part by two people: Fabrice Bellard the genius french mathematician programmer, and Michael Niedermayer, the... oh whatever, the codec god.
Guess which two people were recently proclaimed persona non grata by two jacobin rebels.
To add insult to the injury, it has been recently revealed that Niedermayer wrote a will in the past years, which - in case of his death - ordered all his IT stuff to be given to these very same backstabbers: Attila, and Diego. :(
Presently the project’s two “expert maintainers” (Michael’s words:) are these two part-time ubuntu admin kids... who are completely oblivious to the fact that the hijacked domain (AND the ffmpeg trademark, say hello to Mr. Lawsuit) still belongs to Fabrice. Guaranteed lulz will ensue shortly.
UPDATE: after I published this entry, Attila Kinali (on behalf of the whole FFmpeg!) has contacted my ISP (and my own company), requesting my block. Failed big time.