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

That is standard practice. It is considered irresponsible to not publicly disclose any vulnerability.

The X days is a concession to the developers that the public disclosure will be delayed to give them an opportunity to address the issue.

Here's the question:

Why is Google deliberately running an AI process to find these bugs if they're just going to dump them all on the FFmpeg team to fix?

They have the option to pay someone to fix them.

They also have the option to not spend resources finding the bugs in the first place.

If they think these are so damn important to find that it's worth devoting those resources to, then they can damn well pay for fixing them too.

Or they can shut the hell up and let FFmpeg do its thing in the way that has kept it one of the https://xkcd.com/2347/ pieces of everyone's infrastructure for over 2 decades.

Google is a significant contributor to ffmpeg by way of VP9/AV1/AV2. It's not like it's a gaping maw of open-source abuse, the company generally provides real value to the OSS ecosystem at an even lower level than ffmpeg (which is saying a lot, ffmpeg is pretty in-the-weeds already).

As to why they bother finding these bugs... it's because that's how Google does things. You don't wait for something to break or be exploited, you load your compiler up with santizers and go hunting for bugs.

Yeah this one is kind of trivial, but if the bug-finding infrastructure is already set up it would be even more stupid if Google just sat on it.

Then they can damn well pay for fixing them too.

That's not a choice. You can decide if Google files bugs like this or not, you can't force them to fix them.