Letting people make their own mistakes

rbultje complained that we at Xiph were being idiots trying to implement a new media framework badly, in reference to Arc's OggStream project. Please, give us a little more credit than that. We've never had any interest in implementing a media framework, and nowadays there's no reason too.

Xiph is an open source project, and people are free to contribute what they think is useful under our general umbrella. That doesn't mean the rest of us think just anything someone says they're doing 'for xiph' is a good idea, or will end up 'officially' recommended by the foundation per se. This is such a case. I think Arc has confused here his personal interest in writing something with the community's need for it, that's all. And quite a number of people have told him so, but he's not one to be deterred by such. If you talked to some of the calmer developers you might have gotten a different picture.

There is a need for a convenience library like vorbisfile that handles theora and probably all our other codecs, for someone who wants to use them but doesn't want to tie themselves to one of the big media frameworks. Arc's proposal grew out of that need. What most of us would rather see is something lightweight based on Conrad Parker's excellent liboggz, a libfishsight to go with his libfishsound.

Clearly we do have some kind of image problem, since it's become fashionable to talk about how lame Xiph is. But we are just a very small open source project trying to do something much harder than most people want to be bothered with. If you don't like how it's going, it's up to you to help fix it.