| 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. |