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FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

(thenewstack.io)
1124 points CrankyBear | 11 comments | 11 Nov 25 18:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | 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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skhameneh ◴[11 Nov 25 21:46 UTC] No.45893320[source]▶
I've been a proponent of upstreaming fixes for open source software.

Why? - It makes continued downstream consumption easier, you don't have to rely on fragile secret patches. - It gives back to projects that helped you to begin with, it's a simple form of paying it forward. - It all around seems like the "ethical" and "correct" thing to do.

Unfortunately, in my experience, there's often a lot of barriers within companies to upstream. Reasons can be everything from compliance, processes, you name it... It's unfortunate.

I have a very distinct recollection of talks about hardware aspirations and upstreaming software fixes at a large company. The cultural response was jarring.

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fao_ ◴[11 Nov 25 23:47 UTC] No.45894483[source]▶
As yet, Valve is the only company I know of doing this, and it's paying off in dividends both for Linux and for Valve. In just 5ish years of Valve investing people and money into Linux- specifically mesa and WINE, Linux has gone from a product that is kind of shaky with Windows, to "I can throw a windows program or game at it and it usually works". Imagine how further the OSS ecosystem would be if Open Source hadn't existed, only FOSS; and companies were legally obligated to either publish source code or otherwise invest in the ecosystem.
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1. ajross ◴[12 Nov 25 01:06 UTC] No.45895190[source]▶
> Valve is the only company I know of [upstreaming fixes for open source software]

Sorry, that's ridiculous. Basically every major free software dependency of every major platform or application is maintained by people on the payroll of one or another tech giant (edit: or an entity like LF or Linaro funded by the giants, or in a smaller handful of cases a foundation like the FSF with reasonably deep industry funding). Some are better than others, sure. Most should probably be doing more. FFMpeg in particular is a project that hasn't had a lot of love from platform vendors (most of whom really don't care about software codecs or legacy formats anymore), and that's surely a sore point.

But to pretend that SteamOS is the only project working with upstreams is just laughable.

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2. elcritch ◴[12 Nov 25 02:07 UTC] No.45895607[source]▶
Sure, but the parent’s comment hits on something perhaps. All the tech giants contribute more haphazardly and for their own internal uses.

Valve does seem somewhat rare position of making a proper Linux distro work well with games. Google’s Chromebooks don’t contribute to the linux ecosystem in the same holistic fashion it seems.

3. nick238 ◴[12 Nov 25 02:29 UTC] No.45895746[source]▶
From my time working at a Fortune 100 company, if I ever mentioned pushing even small patches to libraries we effing used, I'd just be met "try to focus on your tickets". Their OSS library and policies were also super byzantine, seemingly needing review of everything you'd release, but the few times I tried to do it the official way, I just never heard anything back from the black-hole mailing list you were supposed to contact.

Yes, I've also worked on OpenStack components at a university, and there I see Red Hat or IBM employees pushing up loads of changes. I don't know if I've ever seen a Walmart, UnitedHealth, Chase Bank, or Exxon Mobil (to pick some of the largest companies) email address push changes.

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4. 7e ◴[12 Nov 25 03:01 UTC] No.45895962[source]▶
Those aren’t tech giants. They're just shit companies. I agree they greatly outnumber Big Tech, in employees if not talent.
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5. nradov ◴[12 Nov 25 03:08 UTC] No.45896008{3}[source]▶
Check again. The Optum unit of UnitedHealth Group has huge revenue from software and technical services. If just that part of the business was spun out it would be one of the top 20 US tech companies.
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6. nradov ◴[12 Nov 25 03:21 UTC] No.45896066[source]▶
I don't know about ExxonMobil but Walmart, UnitedHealth Group, and JPMorganChase employees do actively contribute to open source projects. Maybe just not the ones you used. They have also published some of their own.

https://github.com/walmartlabs

https://github.com/Optum

https://github.com/jpmorganchase

7. ecshafer ◴[12 Nov 25 03:38 UTC] No.45896152[source]▶
To steelman this: I've never worked at any of the companies you listed but most likely Red Hat and IBM employees (Is there still a difference?) are being paid specifically to work on Openstack, as they get money from support contracts. When Walmart of Chase use Openstack there is a rather small team who is implementing openstack to be used as a platform. They are then paying IBM/Redhat for that support. There probably isn't really the expertise in the Openstack team at Warlmart to be adding patches. Some companies spend a different amount of money on in house technology than others, and then open source it.
8. ezconnect ◴[12 Nov 25 10:41 UTC] No.45898589{3}[source]▶
Walmart is a tech giant.
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9. roryirvine ◴[12 Nov 25 13:18 UTC] No.45899773{4}[source]▶
FWIW, when working at a major Silicon Valley tech company in the mid 2010s, my team made significant contributions to OSS projects including OpenStack and the Linux kernel as a core part of our work for Walmart.

The work to upstream our changes was included in the Statements of Work which Walmart signed off on, and our time spent on those efforts was billed to them.

The stats for those projects will have recorded my former employer as the direct source of those contributions - but they wouldn't have existed had it not been for Walmart.

10. red-iron-pine ◴[12 Nov 25 13:50 UTC] No.45900163{4}[source]▶
too bad UnitedHealthGroup is capital-E Evil and is literally running the "death panels" that insane right wing propaganda tried to scare us about
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11. nradov ◴[12 Nov 25 14:33 UTC] No.45900695{5}[source]▶
What a lot of people don't realize is that it's mostly employer HR departments running the "death panels". UHG and its competitors would be happy to sell insurance policies that cover absolutely everything with no questions asked: this would be easier for them to administer without the hassles of utilization management and claim edits. But customers — mainly large employers — demand that insurers (or third-party administrators) impose more restrictive coverage rules in order to hold down medical costs.

Ultimately there will always be some healthcare rationing. This happens in every country. For example, the UK NHS has death panels which decide that certain treatments won't be covered at all because they're not cost effective. Resources are limited and demand is effectively infinite. So the only real question is how we do the rationing.