FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

I've literally had my employer's attorneys tell me I can't upstream patches because it would put my employer's name on the project, and they don't want the liability.

No, it didn't help giving them copies of licenses that have the usual liability clauses.

It seems a lot of corporate lawyers fundamentally misunderstand open source.

Corporate counsel will usually say no to anything unusual because there's no personal upside for them to say yes. If you escalate over their heads with a clear business case then you can often get a senior executive to overrule the attorneys and maybe even change the company policy going forward. But this is a huge amount of extra unpaid work, and potentially politically risky if you don't have a sold management chain.

Sounds like your employers attorneys need to be brought to heel by management. Like most things, this is a problem of management not understanding that details matter.

Why would they invest resources - scarce, expensive time of attorneys - in researching and solving this problem? The attorneys' job is to help the company profit, to maximize ROI for legal work. Where is the ROI here? And remember, just positive ROI is unacceptable; they want maximum ROI per hour worked. When the CEO asks them how this project maximized ROI, what do they say?

I believe in FOSS and can make an argument that lots of people on HN will accept, but many outside this context will not understand it or care.

If you fixed something in an open source library you use, and you don't push that upstream, you are bound to re-apply that patch with every library update you do. And today's compliance rules require you to essentially keep all libraries up to date all the time, or your CVE scanners will light up. So fixing this upstream in the original project has a measurable impact on your "time spent on compliance and updates KPI".

That is a real benefit, I agree.

I don't know if it would work, but sometimes I consider a "moochers" rule wrt opensource code.

Like, here's the deal: The work is proper, legit opensource. You can use it for free, with no obligations.

But if your company makes a profit from it, you're expected to either donate money to the project or contribute code back in kind. (Eg security patches, bug fixes, or contribute your own opensource projects to the ecosystem, etc).

If you don't, all issues you raise and PRs get tagged with a special "moocher" status. They're automatically - by default - ignored or put in a low priority bin. If your employees attend any events, or join a community discord or anything like that, you get a "moocher" badge, so everyone can see that you're a parasite or you work for parasites. Thats ok; opensource licenses explicitly allow parasites. I'm sure you're a nice person. But we don't really welcome parasites in our social spaces, or allow parasites to take up extra time from the developers.

This touches on what I ended up telling them: maintaining a local patchset is expensive and fragile. Running customized versions of things is a self-inflicted compliance problem.

I still had to upstream anonymously, though.

It goes even further sometimes, I've seen someone in the Go community slack announce they are going to dial back their activity because of Very Serious Clauses in their Apple contract.

That seems to imply that Apple employees are prohibited from being good internet citizens and e.g. helping people out with any kind of software issue. This presumably includes contributing to open source, although I'm sure they can get approval for that. But the fact they have to get approval for it is already a chilling effect.

I've spent the last 32 years pushing every employer I've had to contribute back to open source. Because of the sector I work in, more often than not I'm constrained by incredibly tight NDAs.

I can usually stop short of providing code and file a bug that explains the replication case and how to fix it. I've taken patches and upstreamed them pseudonymously on my own time when the employer believed the GPL meant they couldn't own the modifications.

If after all that you still want to label me a moocher at cons, that's your choice.

You can wear your secret cape with pride, don't worry about the moocher badge.

Apple? Not interested in being a good internet citizen? Say it ain't so!