Google provides more assistance to open source software projects than almost any other organization, and these debates are more likely to drive away potential sponsors than to attract them
“We ran AI that may or may not have found a legitimate issue, and you’re not looking into it for us fast enough. That’s going to drive away new volunteers that we need”
I think it’s about driving away financial sponsors, not volunteer developers. So the last sentence is “That’s going to drive away people who want to give you money and make OUR product worse and our lives harder.”
If ffmpeg was not an open source project, and somebody submitted a super obscure ai surfaced bug
The bug would be fixed exactly never
I fail to see how funding them would change that
Sure, if we forget about specifics for a bit, in general terms it does sound reasonable. And they should be sponsoring ffmpeg anyway as they are using it.
However some bug reports should just not happen in the first place
If Google said, look we know we send a lot of bug reports, here’s 50MM a year, go hire a team of dedicated developers to deal with our nonsense, we don’t have the expertise in house to train them on this codebase. I doubt anyone would be complaining.
Nothing wrong with fixing bugs even if they are obscure if you have the time and resources.
It’s common in big tech companies to have a small internal team that has the full-time job of contributing to the FOSS software they use. That is how this should have been handled. Google wants a new feature/bug squished? You’ve got your team that can make the change, that’s literally the whole point of FOSS.
I’m aware, sometimes they also provide funding for FOSS projects. Funding seems to be the option FFmpeg would prefer based on the title (though I’ve not explicitly seen a quote that says this).
If it’s a specialty codebase written entirely in assembly, as this seems to be, sometimes it just makes sense to pay someone else to do it rather than spending 3x as long getting someone in house to do because the expertise isn’t there. Or just put a bounty on it, another common way to provide funding in FOSS.
The fucking gas lighting in this response
“We ran AI that may or may not have found a legitimate issue, and you’re not looking into it for us fast enough. That’s going to drive away new volunteers that we need”
I think it’s about driving away financial sponsors, not volunteer developers. So the last sentence is “That’s going to drive away people who want to give you money and make OUR product worse and our lives harder.”
They do sponsor a lot of open source projects though. ffmpeg should be one of them.
If ffmpeg was not an open source project, and somebody submitted a super obscure ai surfaced bug
The bug would be fixed exactly never
I fail to see how funding them would change that
Sure, if we forget about specifics for a bit, in general terms it does sound reasonable. And they should be sponsoring ffmpeg anyway as they are using it.
However some bug reports should just not happen in the first place
If Google said, look we know we send a lot of bug reports, here’s 50MM a year, go hire a team of dedicated developers to deal with our nonsense, we don’t have the expertise in house to train them on this codebase. I doubt anyone would be complaining.
Nothing wrong with fixing bugs even if they are obscure if you have the time and resources.
It’s common in big tech companies to have a small internal team that has the full-time job of contributing to the FOSS software they use. That is how this should have been handled. Google wants a new feature/bug squished? You’ve got your team that can make the change, that’s literally the whole point of FOSS.
I’m aware, sometimes they also provide funding for FOSS projects. Funding seems to be the option FFmpeg would prefer based on the title (though I’ve not explicitly seen a quote that says this).
If it’s a specialty codebase written entirely in assembly, as this seems to be, sometimes it just makes sense to pay someone else to do it rather than spending 3x as long getting someone in house to do because the expertise isn’t there. Or just put a bounty on it, another common way to provide funding in FOSS.