FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

Is it time for FFmpeg to relicense as AGPL? That'd be fun to witness.

Watch places like Amazon and Google suddenly stop updating and trying to find alternatives.

Like how Apple stopped using up to date the GNU tools in 2008 because of GPL3. That moved showed me then that Apple did not want you to use your computer as your computer.

It'll just get forked (see terraform)

Well, to continue that timeline. "Big Tech" freezes their version to the last gpl'ed version, and each commences their own (non-trivial effort) to make their own version (assuming the last gpl'ed version was not feature-complete for all their future uses).

And of course, they won't share with each other. So another driver would be fear of a slight competitive disadvantage vs other-big-tech-monstrosity having a better version.

Now, in this scenario, some tech CEO, somewhere has this brilliant bright spark.

"Hey, instead of dumping all these manhours & resources into DIYing it, with no guarantee that we still won't be left behind - why don't we just throw 100k at the original oss project. We'll milk the publicity, and ... we won't have to do the work, and ... my competitors won't be able to use it"

I quite like this scenario.

Terraform didn't get licensed as AGPL, just some weird proprietary license.

It'll still cause Google and many others to panic, but weird and custom licenses are even worse for attracting business than open source ones.

I think this would be hard. It also makes not a whole lot of sense IMO.

People need to think about what licence they want to use for a project.

To be clear, what does relicensing to AGPL do here? Does the AGPL include licensing terms that forbid filing bug reports without also including code patches? Or does it just make ffmpeg that much less appealing to projects and cut off the steady stream of contributions that it has gotten from google since 2009? https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/search/HEAD?pg=3;s=...

AGPL is banned from many BigCorps IIRC.

Right, but how is that a benefit here? The bug report was a valid report, ffmpeg is objectively better for it having been filed. Google contributes to ffmpeg on a regular basis according to the git history. They also buy consulting services from the ffmpeg maintainers according to the maintainer's own website. If ffmpeg was banned from Google, all of that would probably stop.

So not only would ffmpeg have multiple uncovered vulnerabilities, they would have less contributions and patches and less money for funding the maintainers. And for what? To satisfy the unfocused and mistaken rage of the peanut gallery online?

Spite I guess.

Imagine Google paying only 100k to ffmpeg though. That's like a single 3-month top-SWE pay at Google.

> To satisfy the unfocused and mistaken rage of the peanut gallery online?

That's only one possible benefit.

Another could be to gain leverage on big tech companies via dual licensing. If Google, Amazon, etc want to continue using FFmpeg without forking, they could do so by paying for the old LGPL license. It would likely be cheaper than maintaining a fork. They'd also have to release their changes anyways due to LGPL if they ever ship it client side.

So the incentive to contribute rather than fork would remain, and the only difference is that they have to pay a licensing fee.

Ofc this is probably just a fantasy. Relicensing FFmpeg like this probably isn't easy or possible.