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FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs (thenewstack.io)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[–] 2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

They do sponsor a lot of open source projects though. ffmpeg should be one of them.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    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.

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