FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

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"

How could ffmpeg maintainers kill three major AWS product lines with an email?

I'd guess Prime Video heavily relies on ffmpeg, then you got Elastic Transcode and the Elemental Video Services. Probably Cloudfront also has special things for streaming that rely on ffmpeg.

The "kill it with an email" probably means that whoever said this is afraid that some usecase there wouldn't stand up to an audit by the usual patent troll mothercluckers. The patents surrounding video are so complex, old and plentiful that I'd assume full compliance is outright impossible.

AWS MediaConvert as well which is a huge API (in surface it covers) which is under Elemental but is kinda it's own thing - willing to bet (though I don't know) that that is ffmpeg somewhere underneath.

The API manual for it is nearly 4000 pages and it can do insane stuff[1].

I had to use it at last job(TM), it's not terrible API wise.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/mediaconvert/latest/apirefe... CAUTION: big PDF.