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youtube-dl
Command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and other video sites (by animelover1984)
Months before the lawsuit, there were plenty of people complaining that youtube-dl's maintainers closed issues without any reason given. Here is one illuminating example:
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/23860
And there is also an entire fork that fixes the support for just a single provider, Niconico, because the maintainers ignored its issues.
https://github.com/animelover1984/youtube-dl
A quote from its README:
All code in this project is licensed solely with the condition that any portion of it is not permitted to be used in the main youtube-dl fork, either directly or indirectly. It is also not permitted to be used in any project that contains contributions from either remitamine or dstftw.
It seems that youtube-dl was a dysfunctionally managed project at the time of the lawsuit, and happened to ride out on the good PR for a couple of months, before returning to stagnation once again.
To me it sounds like a plugin system would have prevented centralization and the need for forks, but would have made distribution harder for average users.
yt-dlc was forked off of youtube-dl during the youtube-dl takedown last year, but has itself been largely unmaintained for months. yt-dlp [1] appears to be by far the most active fork.
[1]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
> There's 843 pull requests at this time, and I just looked and over 50 are from just the last month
That's kinda overwhelming though ... imagine that if the maintainer pops up somewhere, suddenly 100 motivated people may chime in "hey please review this important pull request that's been sitting over here for a while".
There are some kinds of open source projects that are prone to this ... some are really not so bad to maintain if you have the right kind of discipline, because they converge on a stable set of functionality and platform compatibility evolves slowly, but some just naturally have endless room for variations and special cases, and as users increase, PRs increase linearly (instead of sub-linearly as you'd hope). I'm thinking in particular of https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy (of which I contributed to an older fork)
Months before the lawsuit, there were plenty of people complaining that youtube-dl's maintainers closed issues without any reason given. Here is one illuminating example:
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/23860
And there is also an entire fork that fixes the support for just a single provider, Niconico, because the maintainers ignored its issues.
https://github.com/animelover1984/youtube-dl
A quote from its README:
All code in this project is licensed solely with the condition that any portion of it is not permitted to be used in the main youtube-dl fork, either directly or indirectly. It is also not permitted to be used in any project that contains contributions from either remitamine or dstftw.
It seems that youtube-dl was a dysfunctionally managed project at the time of the lawsuit, and happened to ride out on the good PR for a couple of months, before returning to stagnation once again.
To me it sounds like a plugin system would have prevented centralization and the need for forks, but would have made distribution harder for average users.