←back to thread

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
Show context
andriamanitra ◴[12 Nov 25 12:56 UTC] No.45899577[source]▶
As much as I hate to be on Google's side I think they're doing a reasonable thing here. Valid bug reports are valuable contributions on their own, and disclosing security issues is standard practice. Not disclosing them doesn't help anyone. Security through obscurity is not security. If neither FFMPEG nor Google dedicate resources to fixing the issue in 90 days, making it public at least ensures that it gets visibility and thus has a higher chance to get fixed by a third party.

I'm sure Google could (and probably should) do even more to help, but FFMPEG directing social media rage at a company for contributing to their project is a bone-headed move. There are countless non-Google companies relying on FFMPEG that do much less for the project, and a shit show like this is certainly not going to encourage them to get involved.

replies(2): >>45899608 #>>45900012 #
mrkiouak ◴[12 Nov 25 13:00 UTC] No.45899608[source]▶
As someone who worked as a software engineer at Google on a service that heavily depended on FFmpeg, its absurd that Google posts security bugs (which have the obvious potential outcome of driving more free work) vs just paying an engineer to fix the bug.

I promise they are spending more on extra compute for resiliency and redundancy for FFMPEG issues than it would cost for a single SWE to just write a fix and then shepherd through the FFmpeg approval process.

replies(2): >>45899659 #>>45901393 #
1. mrkiouak ◴[12 Nov 25 13:06 UTC] No.45899659[source]▶
Bonus comment: I was present for conversations about how Google should just write an internal version because of all the stability issues, but that that work would never get prioritized or be considered valuable because it wouldn't get anyone promoted (to be fair, given how widely FFmpeg is used, it would have gotten an L4 or L5 promoted, but it would have been a near sisyphean task over years to get to the point where you could demostrate the ridiculously high XXm-XXXm returns that would come from just helping to improve FFmpeg).