[bfz]

While this is true, please don't let it overshadow the tremendous work (possibly even the bulk of it by now) by subsequent maintainers. In the ffmpeg case that involved fighting a well-resourced hostile fork over a period of years, in the Qemu case I believe it means at least 10 years of additional substantial feature development.

I wonder what Bellard's overall hit rate across all those projects looks like in terms of staying around for chores after delivering the initial act of wizardry

[anderspitman]

I agree with you, but I also think it's pretty impressive that Fabrice has started multiple projects that many other people have devoted their entire careers to expanding/maintaining. Almost seems to challenge the common assertion that execution is more important than a great idea.

[hoistbypetard]

These weren't un-executed ideas, though. I think it lines up very well with my general sense that the best way to get to a really good implementation of something is to publish one that's lacking in some way that annoys people. Then you have an idea plus something people can contribute work to improve.

[anderspitman]

> These weren't un-executed ideas, though

I think you're straw-manning what I said a bit.

[hoistbypetard]

Not intentionally… I am arguing that “Almost seems to challenge the common assertion that execution is more important than a great idea” is not the case. Because these ideas were executed.

[svnt]

While I agree we shouldn’t lionize individuals, I think we should also acknowledge there is great value in being the one to start something.

[l33t2328]

What is a “hostile fork?”

[sanxiyn]

Probably talking about libav. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libav has some pointers.

[feikname]

One that have the same binary name as yours for compability reasons, but then proceeds to be not so compatible with slight command line options. Thus, made a whole lot of confusion because people didn't expect that depending on what distro they were using they could be using similar but incompatible software with the same executable filename.