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FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

(thenewstack.io)
1124 points CrankyBear | 1 comments | 11 Nov 25 18:32 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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phkahler ◴[11 Nov 25 19:41 UTC] No.45891830[source]▶
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"

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skrebbel ◴[11 Nov 25 19:52 UTC] No.45891966[source]▶
How could ffmpeg maintainers kill three major AWS product lines with an email?
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joshkel ◴[11 Nov 25 20:24 UTC] No.45892354[source]▶
In a follow-up tweet, Mark Atwood eloborates: "Amazon was very carefully complying with the licenses on FFmpeg. One of my jobs there was to make sure the company was doing so. Continuing to make sure the company was was often the reason I was having a meeting like that inside the company."

I interpret this as meaning there was an implied "if you screw this up" at the end of "they could kill three major product lines with an email."

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1. rs186 ◴[12 Nov 25 11:35 UTC] No.45898904[source]▶
Still doesn't make any sense.

The company that I work at makes sure anything that uses third-party library, whether in internal tools/shipped product/hosted product, goes through legal review. And you'd better comply with whatever the legal team asks you to do. Unless you and everyone around you are as dumb as a potato, you are not going to do things that blatantly violates licenses, like shipping a binary with modified but undisclosed GPL source code. And you can be sure that (1) it's hard to use anything GPL or LGPL in the first place (2) even if you are allowed to, someone will tell you to be extra careful and exactly do what you are told to (or not to)

And as long as Amazon is complying with ffmpeg's LGPL license, ffmpeg can't just stop licensing existing code via an email. Of course, unless there is some secret deal, but again, in that case, someone in the giant corporation will make sure you follow what's in the contract.

Basically, at company at Amazon where there are functional legal teams, the chance of someone "screwing up" is very small.