I’ve spent the first weekend of September in Paris, as j-b organized the yearly VideoLan Dev Days un-conference. I’m happy to have been there, because it was definitely great to be around all the friends and colleagues, and work on libav and discuss what we also need to work on.
What hasn’t been entirely that great, unsurprisingly, has been being around the Google people — both at VDD and at FOMS. The main problem with them is that they are never there to think that they can learn from the others, or that they can be wrong — the feeling that me and others got is that they came with all the answers and we all have to accept them and their options. This is obviously just a generalization — Andrew and Dale has been very pleasant to speak to, outside of the infamous talk which boiled down to “We can’t, or don’t want to, speak about this, but let us tell you again how nice we are for considering using your software and saying we won’t”.
Honestly, I’m surprised that Chrome works at all with the kind of attitude they have — I guess the answer is that the non-media people are saner or, simply, they know what they are doing, instead of just thinking they know what they are doing.
At any rate at least one good thing is coming out of this is that – also thanks to Hanno who pointed me to harvester – is that we’ll soon have a Planet Multimedia to aggregate blog feeds for people working on open multimedia projects — no matter what the project!
More posts on the various topics might come up depending on how much time I have for blogging over the next few weeks.