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.
Providing a real CVE is a contribution, not a burden. The ffmpeg folks can ignore it, since by all indications it's pretty minor.
If it's to fix vulnerabilities, it seems within reason to expect a patch. If the reason Google isn't sending a patch is because they truly think the maintainers can fix it better, then that seems fair. But if Google isn't sending a patch because fixing vulns "doesn't scale" then that's some pretty weak sauce.
Maybe part of the solution is creating a separate low priority queue for bug reports from groups that could fix it but chose not to.
I do think that contributing fuzzing and quality bug reports can be beneficial to a project, but it's just human nature that when someone says "you go ahead and do the work, I'll stand here and criticize", people get angry.
Rather than going off and digging up ten time bombs which all start counting down together, how about digging up one and defusing it? Or even just contributing a bit of funding towards the team of people working for free to defuse them?
If Google really wants to improve the software quality of the open source ecosystem, the best thing they could do is solve the funding problem. Not a lot of people set out to intentionally write insecure code. The only case that immediately comes to mind is the xz backdoor attempt, which again had a root cause of too few maintainers. I think figuring out a way to get constructive resources to these projects would be a much more impressive way to contribute.
This is a company that takes a lot of pride in being the absolute best of the best. Maybe what they're doing can be justified in some way, but I see why maintainers are feeling bullied. Is Google really being excellent here?
Google is not a monolith. If you asked the board, or the shareholders of google what they thought of open source software quality they would say they don't give a rat's ass about it. Someone within google who does care has been given very limited resources to deal with the problem, and are approaching it in the most efficient way they can.
>it's just human nature that when someone says "you go ahead and do the work, I'll stand here and criticize", people get angry
Bug reports are not criticism, they are in fact contributions, and the human thing to do when someone contributes to your project is to thank them.
>This is a company that takes a lot of pride in being the absolute best of the best.
There was an era when people actually believed that google was the best of the best, rather than saying it as a rhetorical trick, and during that era they never would have dreamed of making such self centered demands of google. This project zero business comes across as the last vestige of a dying culture within google. Why do people feel the need to be so antagonitic towards it?
>I can tell you with 100% certainty that there are undiscovered vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel right now. Does that mean they should stop shipping?
Hence why I qualified "deliberately".