[vlc-devel] Update on the VLC project

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le jeudi 3 mai 2012 22:53:00 Pierre Ynard, vous avez écrit :
> Same. Just saying "I disagree and if you decide to do that anyway,
> don't come to whine to me and don't count on me to fix the bugs" could
> be construed as a threat and blackmail and would be forbidden. That's
> ridiculous. Plus, you can't try and prevent Rémi from quitting, forking
> and relicensing if he's not satisfied with the situation, that's just
> wrong.

How about "if you don't pay me heaps of money, I will accept that job offer 
from the Empire of Evil and stop contributing to VLC"?

Yeah, blackmail is highly subjective.

(...)
> As you and I just agreed upon, the technical decision process is the
> least of our problems. A technical arbitration committee wouldn't
> help with the lack of orientation for PR/legal action, the lack of
> orientation for technical developement, the lack of roadmap, the lack of
> orientation for fostering our third-party developer community, and the
> lack of management of personal (as in, not technical) conflicts.

I don't disagree, and I presume JB neither. But I don't see this getting 
fixed. And if it gets fixed, in other words, if VLC gets proper sponsors, 
others will^Wmight complain that the process has been hijacked by some company 
that is not listening to the community, not open, whatever...

(...)
> Not that it
> would solve a big problem: there are decisions that have been made in
> the past, lua stuff for example, despite his disapproval, and it didn't
> prevent development from going on fine anyway.

For the record, I did not disapprove of the Lua plugin as such.

> The only thing that this
> would achieve would be mitigating the tensions and harshness of the
> "YES/NO discussions", by hiding them behind a phantom committee, which
> is not the right solution for the right issue.

Well, I think a committee, if it has the relevant people, would help keep 
developers honest. I mean, it will be much harder for a developer to steer the 
project to his/her own selfish ends if there is a committee and its decisions 
are public.

(...)
> What I believe is that there is no happy option, and you guys are
> too afraid of doing what needs to be done, whatever that is. So you
> do nothing, saying that you're giving it some time to cool down as
> an excuse, and then since you still have to do something, you take a
> symbolic action and wrap it up in a lot of red tape to look like you've
> been productive. j-b, apart from going over the state of the project and
> suggesting the technical committee, what you said is all obvious stuff
> that goes without saying.

I too have my reserves about the effectiveness of the proposal. But I think we 
have to give it its chance at least. If that fails too, then you can always 
fork or quit.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis