On 13 January 2013 11:13, Dan MacDonald <allcoms@gmail.com> wrote:

In all three of these examples it wasn't the fault of the Debian maintainers that these alternate versions get used, it was the authors of the software switching from Free a software license such as the GPL to one that the Debian social contract no longer considers free or trying to enforce copyright on corporate logos or whatever.

I'm not aware that there was any licence change in the ffmpeg/libav situation ? It just seems to have been a personality and development style issue between maintainers. I hear that Debian's decision was based on the fact the Debian maintainer concerned was a member of the libav camp, rather than any real technical issue.

I cannot speak about technical matters, but the change is extremely inconvenient because of all the outside packages which are set up to call ffmpeg and now need to be hand-configured for libav (I'm talking about setting up subsonic to run on an Ubuntu 12.10 server here). And why the libav developers need to change command line options is beyond me - the least they could have done is keep to the established ffmpeg formats. There seems to be no functional reason for it, just a desire to be different.

Fritz