Imagine being one of the most valuable companies on earth, making billions thanks to open-source software like #ffmpeg, without contributing financially to it, without contributing to its codebase, and even expecting those unpaid volunteers to fix bugs for you in a timely fashion as if they were your own employees.
Imagine contributing to a huge piece of software like ffmpeg that works behind the scenes on literally any device that can either play, record or transform media, a project that has become a critical piece of our digital infrastructure, and doing so unpaid, uncredited and stressed out by companies that make billions thanks to your work.
This is the current state of open-source today.
A bunch of burned out, unpaid and uncredited volunteers building free stuff in their spare time that trillion-dollar freeriders feel entitled to use without contributing back.
ffmpeg developers are right. Either #Google contributes back, or they won’t even look at their bugs anymore.
And, in an ideal world where free software licenses weren’t written by good Samaritans, either trillion-dollar companies contribute back, or they shouldn’t be allowed to use free software for profit.
20 years ago I used to have discussions with fellow engineers whether open-source would have won over commercial software.
Now I can firmly say that open-source won. There’s no doubt about it. Linux, Apache products, Python, ffmpeg, curl etc. power all of today’s technological stack. But it’s not the win that I expected. It’s the kind of win that happened because corporations realized that open-source is just a way for them to cut on internal engineering costs.
https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-sending-bugs/
