The comparison with OpenOffice in particular doesn’t hold water in my book. GStreamer has been an open-source/free software project from the start with developers firmly rooted in various other communities; it is not released by a company, nor are there versions of it with different licenses; and no copyright assignment is required either. I’m also not aware of any “company employees feel[ing] frustrated that they’re not getting community traction”, or of “community [members being] frustrated because they have [the] feeling [a] company is looking for cheap labour to implement its agenda”.

I think most, if not all, GStreamer developers would regard themselves as ‘well-embedded’ members of the GNOME, KDE, freedesktop, Linux, GNU, or whatever community.

I also like to think that decision-making within the GStreamer project is fairly transparent and either done on the mailing list, in bugzilla or on IRC, with decisions being made on technical basis. I don’t see any of this changing in future either.

This is not to say that everything’s perfect in the Kingdom of GStreamer; of course there are always time constraints, so patches don’t get reviewed as quickly as they should, bugs fixed as quickly as they should, or new features implemented as quickly as we’d like to, but I don’t see this as having a lot to do with who’s working for which company, and I don’t think GStreamer is faring much worse in this respect than other big projects like, say, Gtk+. If anything, the situation will only get better with more companies involved, since there’ll (hopefully) be more eyes and hands working on the GStreamer codebase.

Just to make sure this is clear: we’ll certainly continue to develop, debug, fix and maintain GStreamer in much the same way that we did before, and our continuing activity in CVS, bugzilla, IRC and the mailing list hopefully demonstrates this.

In short: if you have any particular gripes with the current decision-making process in GStreamer, or the transparency of it, I’d really like to know about it (and so would most of the other GStreamer developers I presume). If not, well, then I still don’t really know what your blog was about. (Disclaimer: it’s late)

Or maybe I’m missing som informations. Have the commiting rights of Christian, Edward and Wim been revoked ? Or do I misread you and you just want more formal policies to be discussed ?

Could you elaborate please as I fail to see the point here.
I’m not being ironic here or provocative, just would like to understand the problem better.

Thanks.