FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

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"

Why? - It makes continued downstream consumption easier, you don't have to rely on fragile secret patches. - It gives back to projects that helped you to begin with, it's a simple form of paying it forward. - It all around seems like the "ethical" and "correct" thing to do.

Unfortunately, in my experience, there's often a lot of barriers within companies to upstream. Reasons can be everything from compliance, processes, you name it... It's unfortunate.

I have a very distinct recollection of talks about hardware aspirations and upstreaming software fixes at a large company. The cultural response was jarring.

No, it didn't help giving them copies of licenses that have the usual liability clauses.

It seems a lot of corporate lawyers fundamentally misunderstand open source.