[FFmpeg-devel] Democratization

[James Almer]

On 1/14/2025 2:06 PM, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> Hi
> 
> To come back to this, and iam not sure this is the best mail to reply
> to (i think there was a better one)
> but thres a glaring missconception, see below
> 
> On Thu, Jan 02, 2025 at 04:38:07PM +0100, Niklas Haas wrote:
>> On Thu, 02 Jan 2025 15:17:31 +0100 Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc> wrote:
> [...]
>>>      People will have shares proportional to their contribution to FFmpeg.
>>
>> Just to nitpick the terminology a bit: This would no longer be a democracy,
>> but rather an oligarchy, since the vast majority of the voting shares would be
>> held in a very small handful of people on account of the exponential
>> distribution of commit count per contributor.
> 
> The FFmpeg community are at least 2263 People, that are the people "living on"
> FFmpeg devel.

Where did you get that number? Because i don't see that many 
contributors on this list, or on IRC, or in the last several years of 
commit history.

> The same way as the people living in a country, if you define democracy as
> "everyone" to have an equal vote right irrespective of contribution then
> it is at least all these people
> 
> The 49 people in the current general assembly are not a democracy.
> They are maybe an aristrocracy, maybe a oligarchy maybe something else,
> but it is not a democracy, because its simply not all the people as in,
> demos being people.

The GA is a list of currently active contributors, not of every person 
that committed a patch in the last quarter of a century or sent an email 
to this ml. It is them who, in a community managed project, should have 
the last word to where the project should go. And how are differences 
solved? By a democratic vote where the majority wins.

You're being incredibly dismissive of the people who are keeping the 
project alive by giving them labels like the above.

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