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.

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.

> These weren't un-executed ideas, though

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

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.

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.

What is a “hostile fork?”

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

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.