RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO
The takedown didn't backfire at all just because some people decided to publish on Twitter a tarball that still happens to be hosted in many other places so there is absolutely no risk of it getting lost.The problem is that the project may not survive this.Major distributions for example will no longer carry the project and likely refuse to touch it even with a ten-foot pole (think media codecs situation). It will be relegated to 3rd party repos. They will lose users, they will lose contributors. And how long until YT's (and/or the other supported websites) HTML changes more rapidly until the remaining manpower can't keep up?