Most of them would just pirate in the old days, and most FOSS licences give them clear conscience to behave as always.
1) dedicating compute resources to continuously fuzzing the entire project
2) dedicating engineering resources to validating the results and creating accurate and well-informed bug reports (in this case, a seriously underestimated security issue)
3) additionally for codecs that Google likely does not even internally use or compile, purely for the greater good of FFMPEG's user base
Needless to say, while I agree Google has a penny to spare to fund FFMPEG, and should (although they already contribute), I do not agree with funding this maintainer.
- choosing to do this of their own volition
- are effectively just using their resources to throw bug reports over the wall unprompted.
- benefiting from the bugs getting fixed, but not contributing to them.
https://j00ru.vexillium.org/2014/01/ffmpeg-and-the-tale-of-a...
"While reading about the 4xm demuxer vulnerability, we thought that we could help FFmpeg eliminate many potential low-hanging problems from the code by making use of the Google fleet and fuzzing infrastructure we already had in place"