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FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

(thenewstack.io)
1125 points CrankyBear | 4 comments | 11 Nov 25 18:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.004s | source
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phkahler ◴[11 Nov 25 19:41 UTC] No.45891830[source]▶
From TFA this was telling:

Thus, as Mark Atwood, an open source policy expert, pointed out on Twitter, he had to keep telling Amazon to not do things that would mess up FFmpeg because, he had to keep explaining to his bosses that “They are not a vendor, there is no NDA, we have no leverage, your VP has refused to help fund them, and they could kill three major product lines tomorrow with an email. So, stop, and listen to me … ”

I agree with the headline here. If Google can pay someone to find bugs, they can pay someone to fix them. How many time have managers said "Don't come to me with problems, come with solutions"

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skrebbel ◴[11 Nov 25 19:52 UTC] No.45891966[source]▶
How could ffmpeg maintainers kill three major AWS product lines with an email?
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zxspectrum1982 ◴[11 Nov 25 19:54 UTC] No.45891984[source]▶
Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in other open source projects.
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NewsaHackO ◴[11 Nov 25 20:04 UTC] No.45892103[source]▶
But if it gets relicensed, they would still be able to use the current version. Amazon definitely would be able to fund an independent fork.
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wewtyflakes ◴[11 Nov 25 20:09 UTC] No.45892164[source]▶
Sounds like it would be a lot of churn for nothing; if they can fund a fork, then they could fund the original project, no?
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cortesoft ◴[11 Nov 25 20:42 UTC] No.45892545[source]▶
They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork.

It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.

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edoceo ◴[11 Nov 25 20:48 UTC] No.45892610[source]▶
If they want that level of control, reimburse for all the prior development too. - ie: buy that business.

As it stands, they're just abusing someone's gift.

Like jerks.

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1. rolandog ◴[11 Nov 25 21:39 UTC] No.45893243{3}[source]▶
There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.
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2. renewiltord ◴[11 Nov 25 21:48 UTC] No.45893342[source]▶
That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either.

In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.

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3. zrm ◴[11 Nov 25 22:23 UTC] No.45893707[source]▶
There is also the AGPL.
4. bigiain ◴[12 Nov 25 03:57 UTC] No.45896236[source]▶
I reckon this is an impedance mismatch between "Open Source Advocacy" and Open Source as a programming hobby/lifestyle/itch-to-scratch that drives people to write and release code as Open Source (of whatever flavour they choose, even if FSS and/or OSF don't consider that license to qualify as "Open Source").

I think Stallmann's ideological "allowing users to run, modify, and share the software without restrictions" stance is good, but I think for me at least that should apply to "users" as human persons, and doesn't necessarily apply to "corporate personhood" and other non-human "users". I don't see a good way to make that distinction work in practice, but I think it's something that if going to become more and more problematic as time goes on, and LLM slop contributions and bug reports somehow feed into this too.

I was watching MongoDB and Redis Labs experiments with non-OSF approved licences clearly targeted at AWS "abusing" those projects, but sadly neither of those cases seemed to work out in the long term. Also sadly, I do not have any suggestions of how to help...