[kbenson]

That's not an accurate assessment of what's going on. The post linked states "no contact with the maintainers" not just inactivity, and if you follow the github issues linked, it's about people wondering what's going on and if anyone else can approve pull requests because there's lots of pull requests waiting. There's 843 pull requests at this time, and I just looked and over 50 are from just the last month.

It's not that there's repo inactivity, it seems to be that this is an extremely active repo which saw everything grind to a halt when the admins went dark. That's quite a bit different then just "inactivity".

[ploxiln]

> 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)

[kjaftaedi]

youtube-dl relies on up-to-date definitions of sites in order to download the content.

When a webpage changes layout, youtube-dl needs updated as well.

We're talking mostly about a list of site definitions more than we are core development.

[nonbirithm]

Months before the lawsuit, youtube-dl's maintainers frequently closed issues that reported ongoing breakage without giving a reason. Here is one especially 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.

The two users mentioned are or were previously major contributors to youtube-dl.

It seems that youtube-dl was already 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.

[pwdisswordfish8]

Indeed, this has been years in the making. Maintainer activity has been slowly dwindling while would-be contributors were driven away by the maintainers’ lack of communication and abrasiveness. I myself have had pull requests languishing there for years with nobody bothering to review them. Other people had their issues closed with no explanation. It was just a matter of time. Good thing that the forks have sprung up some time before upstream development halted entirely.