debian-multimedia.org considered harmful - redux

[Fabian Greffrath]

Dear Stefano,

thanks for taking care of this.

Please note that I am neither a DD nor a DM. But as a regular 
contributor and one of the oldest members in this team, I feel 
authorized to reply and present at least my own personal opinion. ;)

Am 18.03.2012 22:41, schrieb Stefano Zacchiroli:
> I'd like to know if, in the opinion of the Debian Multimedia Team as a
> whole, debian-multimedia.org is currently more harmful than useful to
> the Debian Project and its users.

Yes, I think it's a lot more harmful than useful for several reasons:

1) the aforementioned incompatibilities and package name clashes with 
official Debian packages

2) the interest conflict that became visible when d-m.o personell 
tried to actively prevent the inclusion of full-enabled ffmpeg 
packages into Debian, cf.
<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=592457#57>

3) the presence of these packages in d-m.o distracts the attention 
from the official Debian archive; we were able to get e.g. transcode 
and gpac into the official archive - for the benefit of all - without 
that much of a hassle, which was not even tried by d-m.o personell in 
the first place - interest conflict again, if you are asking me.

I believe that now, with the Debian Patent Policy available, we can 
get at least half of the d-m.o packages into official Debian. I 
believe that the current situation, in which d-m.o users get bound and 
locked to this repository e.g. by means of their ffmpeg library 
packages dependencies, could be connected to this fact - given how 
much this could affect the click-statistics and thus income of d-m.o.

> Note that I explicitly ask for a team position on this matter. I'm well
> aware of Reinhard position, also thanks to his mail, but I'd like to
> understand if his is the uniform view on the team, or if there are other
> positions within the team.

What I have written above is certainly not *the team's position* but 
only the first few points that came to my mind.

Best Regards,
Fabian