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FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

(thenewstack.io)
1124 points CrankyBear | 7 comments | 11 Nov 25 18:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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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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joshkel ◴[11 Nov 25 20:24 UTC] No.45892354[source]▶
In a follow-up tweet, Mark Atwood eloborates: "Amazon was very carefully complying with the licenses on FFmpeg. One of my jobs there was to make sure the company was doing so. Continuing to make sure the company was was often the reason I was having a meeting like that inside the company."

I interpret this as meaning there was an implied "if you screw this up" at the end of "they could kill three major product lines with an email."

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1. phkahler ◴[11 Nov 25 22:05 UTC] No.45893532[source]▶
Are you interpreting that as "if we violate the license, they can revoke our right to use the software" ?? And they use it in 3 products so that would be really bad. That would make sense to have a compliance person.
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2. zinekeller ◴[12 Nov 25 01:58 UTC] No.45895534[source]▶
Possibly Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, and another one that escapes my mind (AWS-related?).
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3. procflora ◴[12 Nov 25 02:15 UTC] No.45895665[source]▶
AWS for sure (Elemental maybe?), but could also be Ring.
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4. a_vanderbilt ◴[12 Nov 25 03:37 UTC] No.45896147[source]▶
And Blink. I used to contract with them a few years back, they all rely heavily on open source.
5. bigiain ◴[12 Nov 25 03:43 UTC] No.45896177{3}[source]▶
Yeah - Amazon Elastic Transcoder which they just shut down and replaced with Elemental MediaConvert is almost certainly just managed "ffmpeg as a Service" under the hood.
6. troupo ◴[12 Nov 25 07:35 UTC] No.45897325[source]▶
Twitch definitely. This whole brouhaha has been brewing for a while, and can be traced back to a spat between Theo and ffmpeg.

In the now deleted tweet Theo thrashed VLC codecs to which ffmpeg replied basically "send patches, but you wouldn't be able to". The reply to which was

--- start quote ---

https://x.com/theo/status/1952441894023389357

You clearly have no idea how much of my history was in ffmpeg. I built a ton of early twitch infra on top of yall.

--- end quote ---

This culminated in Theo offering a 20k bounty to ffmpeg if they remove the people running ffmpeg twitter account. Which prompted a lot of heated discussion.

So when Google Project Zero posted their bug... ffmpeg went understandably ballistic

7. ◴[12 Nov 25 14:08 UTC] No.45900369[source]▶