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Why Elon Musk's Neuralink brain implant reframes our ideas of self-identity https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240416-why-elon-musks-neuralink-brain-implant-reframes-our-ideas-of-self-identity

Why Elon Musk's Neuralink brain implant reframes our ideas of self-identity
When we merge mind and machine, the traditional borders of the self dissipate, says philosopher Dvija Mehta.

Let's reminisce on #LibAV, the #FFmpeg fork. I won't get into the details why it was forked because I've heard multiple versions and I'm biased.
During its primetime, LibAV was facing three difficulties. Firstly, FFmpeg held "the brand" — it defined what the users expected, it received the bulk of the donations and the contributions. Secondly, LibAV aimed to improve the code quality. This roughly meant that FFmpeg could easily merge improvements back (and they did) but not everything was fit to be merged the other way around. Thirdly, LibAV tried hard to clean stuff up and deprecate old API, effectively facing more backwards compatibility issues.
In the end, LibAV-related work would involve both keeping feature parity with FFmpeg, and patching software to support its API. Sometimes this meant dead software, for which you'd have to maintain patchsets forever. Sometimes it meant hostile upstreams, which involved maintaining and rebasing patchsets forever. Perhaps the most prominent example was the #mpv media player, that would first give LibAV a push by removing FFmpeg support and requiring LibAV, and then change their mind and remove LibAV support.
On top of that, the two library sets weren't ABI-compatible, so it was all-or-nothing. #Gentoo users would have to randomly rebuild all packages when a newly selected package or a version bump forced a switch. Binary distros have had it even worst. Debian eventually switched back to FFmpeg in 2015, Gentoo removed it in 2020, and LibAV itself was discontinued in 2022.
What brought this about? The news of corporate takeover of nginx, followed by its fork to FreeNginx. Not the first such a case, and certainly not the last — perhaps it's another variant of enshittification. OpenOffice was successfully forked into LibreOffice. BerkeleyDB is being phased out after its takeover by Oracle. LibreSSL is still alive alongside OpenSSL, thought it's not supported widely.