> In the last few years, more than half of the commits are from him.
This is completely incorrect. Most of his commits are merges from libav and other forks, and not code commits.
He's doing a great job at it, but he is not irreplaceable.
What else should/could he have done that would be better?
he could have stepped back much earlier
or someone else could have stepped up much earlier?
Well people actually have tried that 4 years ago: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/123868
and somehow leadership was still a thing for Michael at that time, which really contradicts with something he says now.
That looks very much like a hostile takeover, it's unsurprising that it failed.
It was very much a hostile takeover. If I remember correctly, the people who controlled the infrastructure like the website and mailing list booted out not only Michael but also a bunch of the existing maintainers of ffmpeg code and it got really ugly.
You might check your facts before spouting this kind of sentences.
Sadly the people on the Libav side never spoke up and nobody really checked or asked since they are "EVIL".
Even without if you remove him and the common committers between the 2 projects the 9 first top committers of FFMPEG commit more than top 2 of libav : https://lwn.net/Articles/650816/
That's incorrect. Those statistics include all the MERGE commits from libav into FFmpeg, which happen several time per day. Michael did not do 1500 commits more than the second commiter.
No, those statistics exclude merge commits . Here's the command that generated those outputs [1]:
git shortlog -ns --no-merges v11..HEAD | head -n15
git shortlog -ns --no-merges n2.4..HEAD | head -n15
Michael Niedermayer is an EXTREMELY prolific dev who has been banging out FFMPEG code for more than a decade. It's by no means a one-man show, many other devs make large and valuable contributions - but in relative terms Niedermayer absolutely dominates FFMPEG, both in terms of personality and code output.
This remove only merge commits, but the commits themself are from libav
I don't blame Michael for any of this situation, but this is not a win for the community, product, or users. Development is going to slow way down, bugs are going to go unfixed, and the overall quality will decline in the short to medium term. It is unfortunate that vitriol over the fork led to this situation, where neither libav nor FFmpeg win, and everyone loses.