FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

I would suggest that FFmpeg spin up a commercial arm that gets support contracts with Google, Amazon, etc, but with a tight leash so that it does not undermine the open source project. Would need clean guidance as to what the commercial arm does and does not.

Probably could pull in millions per year.

If it just were that simple. The reality is that this is a very slippery slope and you won’t get a support contract just like that with a “tight leash”

While I don't think FFmpeg's response is a great one ("fund us or stop submitting bugs"); I think Google is being pretty shitty here. For a company that prides itself in its engineering prowess and contributions to the OSS community (as they like to remind me all the time) to behave this way is just all around shitty.

Submit the bug AND the patch and be done with it; don't make it someone else's problem when it's an OSS library/tool. A for-profit vendor? Absolutely. But this? Hell naw.

In general it is not good when companies get too much power. See how shopify is eating away the ruby infrastructure right now after RubyCentral panicked when shopify blackmailed the community by taking away funding. Of course it is their money, but the whole ecosystem suddenly submitting to one huge company, really really sucks to no ends. Hobbyists are at the weakest here.

If FFmpeg had a commercial operation it would constantly be getting sued for IP issues.

According to https://xcancel.com/argvee/status/1986194861855478213#m, google is a customer of fflabs.eu (https://fflabs.eu) which is just such a "support contracts" arm. Certainly the fflabs.eu site claims at the bottom that Netflix, Google and Meta are all customers of theirs and the site also claims that their team is comprised of a number of ffmpeg contributors including the "lead maintainer" (https://fflabs.eu/about/).

Additionally, a search of the git commits shows a regular stream of commits from `google.com` addresses. So as near as I can tell, Google does regularly contribute code to the project, they are a customer of the project maintainer's commercial support company (and that fact is on the support company's website) and they submit high quality bug reports for vulnerabilities. What are we mad about again?