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.

The issue at hand is that Google has a policy of making the security issue public regardless of whether a fix has been produced.

Typically disclosures happen after a fix exists.

This isn’t true at all in my experience: disclosures happen on a timeline (60 to 90 days is common), with extensions provided as a courtesy based on remediation complexity and other case-by-case considerations. I’ve been party to plenty of advisories that went public without a fix because the upstream wasn’t interested in providing one.