Topics / Open-source software

Attributed viewpoint · Not a direct quote

A small FFmpeg core team bears the maintenance burden

Jean-Baptiste Kempf describes FFmpeg’s core community as ten to fifteen people who will maintain accepted code. Contrasting roughly one thousand historical contributors with ten who stay, he argues that contributions must be maintainable and excellent because so few people maintain critical software.

Behind the viewpoint

Translations are for reading; original excerpts remain the evidence.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf on open-source code quality, maintenance and secure builds

Original excerpt

one thousand contributors in the timeline and just ten staying, it’s a one percent chance that someone comes and stays. One percent. So you will have change of job, change of wives, you have children, you have accidents in life. You’re going to change jobs, whatever. You’re not going to come back. It’s most likely. So we are the ones going to maintain your code.
Context

He’s very harsh, but what people don’t see is usually when he’s harsh, it’s to people who are maintainers of part of the kernel, right? So they know him, right? So he’s not very harsh like that to everyone. The thing is, what he created in his room is basically powering every server online, right? Even at Microsoft’s cloud called Azure, I’m quite sure seventy, eighty percent of the servers are running Linux. All your Android phones are running Linux. What he did with the power of open source, sure, is amazing. And yes, the quality of the Linux kernel is very high, and yes, it’s difficult, but we cannot compromise on that. We cannot compromise on quality because in the end—and you have to understand that—the core community of VLC is five people. But we should also mention that there is some spiciness, some harshness to the language that’s sometimes used when you’re keeping this high bar of excellence. Is there something to say to that?

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