Once upon a time, there was a free software project called motion. It did motion detection, and it worked well, and everything was fine and good for a very long time.
Eventually, the original author of motion moved on, and somebody who was ......let's go with "less focused"..... took his place.
Let's give this person a pseudonym: "Mr Dick"
Mr Dick at some point forked his own project into a new branch, which was called "motionplus".
This name, however, was a bit of a misnomer, because one of the things Mr Dick
started doing was removing features from this "new and improved" version.
Mr Dick worked hard and diligently, doing important work like porting from C to C++ (C is such a non-shiny language, you see), making the code run slower, removing old features that he assumed people weren't using, and removing features people were using, but which he couldn't be bothered to maintain/repimplement (or maybe didn't understand / couldn't figure out how to port to C++?*).
Sure, nobody was using it, because people want their security cameras to be reliable and stable long-term, and because people tend to want their "upgraded" software to have more features, not fewer, and to be compatible with the configuration they've been using for decades. But on the positive side, Mr Dick did get to work on his new shiny thing, and totally put "C++" on his resume.
One day, he decided he couldn't be bothered maintaining the old version anymore, because it wasn't new and shiny and sometimes took 10 or 15 minutes out of his day, so he put up a poll on github, soliciting opinions on whether the new shiny terrible version should replace the old reliable, useful version.
The community voted no - after about a week the result was something like 60% no.
So Mr Dick "left the poll open".
People made suggestions as to compromises and ways to keep the best of both worlds, these suggestions received no response of any kind from Mr Dick.
A few months later, Mr Dick commented on the poll, saying that since the result had changed to 55% yes, he was "now inclined to merge".
People again suggested compromises and tried to open up discussions on alternative courses of action that wouldn't break installed software for thousands of users.
Mr Dick couldn't be bothered responding to those discussions at all.
3 days after saying he was "inclined" to merge, he merged the shiny new terribleness into the master branch without warning or duscussion.
To clarify, by "55% yes", that means "55% of 40 people", i.e the 10% margin in the vote was 4 people. To call this anything close to concensus would be disingenuous at best. (Note: These 4 people were definitely not sockpuppet accounts created by Mr Dick, and any suggestion otherwise would just be unfounded speculation)
When questioned as to why he didn't bother to respond or discuss with the community, Mr Dick invented fictional excues why he hadn't responded to suggestions and engaged in discustion.
It seems that the truth was that he just wanted his new shiny. We will likely never know the actual reason, because...
When questioned, Mr Dick, in a shining display of arrogance and hubris, became quite antagonistic with no cause, and refused to respond to questions or engage meaningfully in discussion at all, almost like he was upset by the fact that someone would dare question him.
In a discussion where he was soliciting suggestions.
In the process, he alienated people who would have been more than happy to contribute to the project.
This is not how you should run an Open Source project. Alienating people makes them not contribute. It can make them fork, which causes duplicated work and fragmentation in the community - it's not optimal.
Thus, this project was created, forking off the "old", reliable, useful branch, and discarding all the new shiny awfulness, so that people using motion could continue to use motion-minus, without the hassle of wasting their time going through the massive list of removed features, or messing around renaming config files and the options therein because Mr Dick couldn't be bothered to maintain compatibility or to even document the changes he'd made.
TL;DR, motion-minus is just like motion, minus:
- Shiny CADT vanity projects that lack feature parity with the version you've been using for decades.
- incompatibility with your existing motion setup.
- Arrogant maintainers who dislike being questioned and can't be bothered engaging with their community..
TL;DR of the TL;DR is: if you were using motion, and it broke due to Mr Dick's laziness and stupidity, motion minus is your cure.
* it might be interesting to find out by asking Mr Dick, but Mr Dick doesn't like it when you ask questions.
Yeah, I don't understand it either. Some people are just assholes 🤷
So, what does the future hold for motion-minus?
Maybe not very much? And that's totally fine!
Some software doesn't really need improving, and is fine with only minor changes to keep it compiling on current systems. Not everything has to be shiny and new - "old" doesn't mean bad. In fact, it can often mean somee positive things, e.g "reliable" and "efficient".
The new maintainer doesn't have a huge amount of free time, so motion-minus will almost certainly not have many new features added unless they're contributed by the community. Patches are very welcome, however.
Some older features/hardware may be deprecated and removed over time, but only after taking steps to check whether they're being used, because removing stuff that you "think isn't being used" is the type of thing an incompetent person would do.
No features of motionplus are likely to be ported over. This project is for people are happy with reliable, stable, lightweight, full-featured motion detection, compatible with the hardware you've been using for decades.
This project respects the time of its users: This software will continue to be packaged long term, and care will always be taken not to break compatibility with existing setups unless absolutely necessary.
One item which is on the short-term roadmap is moving the repo over to gitlab.
Join us! contribute patches and new features if you want them. If you're interested in contributing, please open a discussion thread to introduce yourself and talk about your ideas.
Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed. Or in other words, it can detect motion.
The documentation for Motion is contained within the file motion_guide.html.
The offline version of this file is available in the doc/motion directory. The online version of the motion_guide.html file can be viewed here
In addition to the detailed building instructions included within the guide, the INSTALL file contains abbreviated building instructions.
Please join the mailing list here
We prefer support through the mailing list because more people will have the benefit from the answers. A archive of mailing list discussions can be viewed here
Motion is mainly distributed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (GPL) version 2 or later. See the copyright file for a list of all the licensing terms of the various components of Motion.
The file CREDITS lists the many people who have contributed to Motion over the years.
Issues and Patches should be submitted via gitlab and include detail descriptions of the issue being addressed as well as any documentation updates that would be needed with the change.