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FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

(thenewstack.io)
1125 points CrankyBear | 1 comments | 11 Nov 25 18:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.228s | source
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bhouston ◴[11 Nov 25 20:02 UTC] No.45892071[source]▶
I would suggest that FFmpeg spin up a commercial arm that gets support contracts with Google, Amazon, etc, but with a tight leash so that it does not undermine the open source project. Would need clean guidance as to what the commercial arm does and does not.

Probably could pull in millions per year.

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1. tpmoney ◴[12 Nov 25 02:48 UTC] No.45895879[source]▶
According to https://xcancel.com/argvee/status/1986194861855478213#m, google is a customer of fflabs.eu (https://fflabs.eu) which is just such a "support contracts" arm. Certainly the fflabs.eu site claims at the bottom that Netflix, Google and Meta are all customers of theirs and the site also claims that their team is comprised of a number of ffmpeg contributors including the "lead maintainer" (https://fflabs.eu/about/).

Additionally, a search of the git commits shows a regular stream of commits from `google.com` addresses. So as near as I can tell, Google does regularly contribute code to the project, they are a customer of the project maintainer's commercial support company (and that fact is on the support company's website) and they submit high quality bug reports for vulnerabilities. What are we mad about again?