I don't like how they interpret the table with the numbers of commits.
I tried this criteria, I divide the committers in three groups:
A) Michael Niedermayer
B) People with more commits in FFmpeg, i.e. Clément Bœsch, James Almer
Carl, Eugen Hoyos, ...
C) People with more commits in libav, i.e. Vittorio Giovara, Martin Storsjö, Anton Khirnov, ...
(I supouse there are other commits from people outside the published table, but they are few.)
Statistics:
libav FFmpeg
A) 46 1831
B) 37 1071
C) 1074 856
Tot: 1157 3758
An alternative interpretation is that if tomorrow Michael Niedermayer is hit by a bus, the other committers of FFmpeg still make almost the same numbers of commits than the committers of libav (even ignoring the ported commits).
Complete table:
Developer libav FFmpeg
---------------------------------
Michael Niedermayer 46 1831
---------------------------------
Clément Bœsch 179
James Almer 155
Carl Eugen Hoyos 150
Andreas Cadhalpun 21 114
Lukasz Marek 98
Paul B Mahol 93
Ronald S. Bultje 85
wm4 16 83
Christophe Gisquet 66
Benoit Fouet 48
>>>Subtotal 37 1071
---------------------------------
Vittorio Giovara 294 294
Martin Storsjö 253 252
Anton Khirnov 206 197
Luca Barbato 131 113
Diego Biurrun 72
Rémi Denis-Courmont 32
Hendrik Leppkes 17
Himangi Saraogi 16
Gabriel Dume 16
Federico Tomassetti 14
Peter Meerwald 12
Janne Grunau 11
>>>Subtotal 1074 856
------------------------------------
>>>>>>Total 1157 3758
As you can see many of the other major contributors to ffmpeg are also contributors to libav.
This is explained that ffmpeg merges back a lot of libav but not so much in the other direction.
In other words, if this is true and all major contributors except for Michael are in fact libav developers then ffmpeg might have a hard time when Michael leaves.
But since Michael alone seems to "outdevelop" all others, ffmpeg comes ahead in terms of features and supported codecs, so people prefer ffmpeg. Since i don't know the ffmpeg APIs or the code quality, i don't know if it is true that ffmpeg has the worse design and development process. If it is true and Michael leaves it sounds like a lot work to take over. On the other hand... i understand that libav was already a fork of ffmpeg.. So some people did take over the code in the past.
Perhaps the table is not clear enought. I don't know about the exact members of each group, so I have to guess. I hope nobody get offended if misclassified.
Let's put Michael Niedermayer in his own group "A".
Clément Bœsch has no commits in libav and 179 in FFmpeg. So I guess he's in the FFmpeg team.
Andreas Cadhalpun has 21 in libav and 114 in FFmpeg . So I guess he's in the FFmpeg team.
I put all the persons who have more commits in FFmpeg than in libav in the FFmpeg team. Let's call this team "B". The classification is clear, because in all the cases the difference is big.
Vittorio Giovara has 294 commits in libav and 294 in FFmpeg. It's a tie! It's more difficult to guess, but I put him in the libav team. (This choice makes the bus factor bigger.)
Martin Storsjö has 253 in libav and 252 in FFmpeg. It's also difficult to guess, but I put him in the libav team.
I put all the persons who have more commits in libav in FFmpeg in the libav team. Let's call this team "C". Some cases are difficult to classify, but I choose the classification that makes the bus factor bigger.
In the table:
libav FFmpeg
A) 46 1831
B) 37 1071
C) 1074 856
Tot: 1157 3758
Ignoring the group A) and making a lot of assumptions, the table it can be read as
The persons in group B wrote 1071 commits for FFmpeg and 37 of them were copied to libav
The persons in group C wrote 1074 commits for libav and 856 of them were copied to FFmpeg.
The moral is that with the data of the table it's not clear that the group B is much smaller than group C. Only that group A is bigger than both!
Good point. It's quite difficult to assign authorship automatically. Take a look at this not-yet-merged commit: https://git.allseenalliance.org/gerrit/#/c/4870/ who authored it? Todd. Who has signed off on editing it? Todd and me. How would you assign ownership? By LOC, Todd wrote essentially 100% of the patch, but since I edited it last, my name is last in the list of editors.
I tried this criteria, I divide the committers in three groups:
A) Michael Niedermayer
B) People with more commits in FFmpeg, i.e. Clément Bœsch, James Almer Carl, Eugen Hoyos, ...
C) People with more commits in libav, i.e. Vittorio Giovara, Martin Storsjö, Anton Khirnov, ...
(I supouse there are other commits from people outside the published table, but they are few.)
Statistics:
An alternative interpretation is that if tomorrow Michael Niedermayer is hit by a bus, the other committers of FFmpeg still make almost the same numbers of commits than the committers of libav (even ignoring the ported commits).Complete table: