FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

I’m an open source maintainer, so I empathize with the sentiment that large companies appear to produce labor for unpaid maintainers by disclosing security issues. But appearance is operative: a security issue is something that I (as the maintainer) would need to fix regardless of who reports it, or would otherwise need to accept the reputational hit that comes with not triaging security reports. That’s sometimes perfectly fine (it’s okay for projects to decide that security isn’t a priority!), but you can’t have it both ways.

My takeaway from the article was not that the report was a problem, but a change in approach from Google that they’d disclose publicly after X days, regardless of if the project had a chance to fix it.

To me its okay to “demand” from a for profit company (eg google) to fix an issue fast. Because they have ressources. But to “demand” that an oss project fix something with a certain (possibly tight) timeframe.. well I’m sure you better than me, that that’s not who volunteering works

On the other hand as an ffmpeg user do you care? Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it? I mean someone could already be using the vulnerability regardless of what Google does.

This is a fantastic argument for the universe where Google does not disclose vulnerability until the maintainers had had reasonable time to fix it.

In this world the user is left vulnerable because attackers can use published vulnerabilities that the maintainers are to overwhelmed to fix

This program discloses security issues to the projects and only discloses them after they have had a "reasonable" chance to fix it though, and projects can request extensions before disclosure if projects plan to fix it but need more time.

Google runs this security program even on libraries they do not use at all, where it's not a demand, it's just whitehat security auditing. I don't see the meaningful difference between Google doing it and some guy with a blog doing it here.

Google is a multi-billion dollar company, which is paying people to find these bugs in the first place.

That's a pretty core difference.