Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg | Hacker News Reader

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg

phoronix.com

198 pointsvmbrasseur46 comments

It's very good that ffmpeg gets support and the sovereign tech fund is a good idea but for me it again just highlights how perverted the incentives to support open source are.

Millions of dollars are extracted by using ffmpeg from a lot of corporations, yet the German taxpayer pays for maintenance.

Finally my taxes are put to good use for once

before any of us bein patting ourselves on the back, It's prolly best to acknowledge that without Frances copyright laws this project along with many others would've been killed by lawyers.

> before any of us bein patting ourselves on the back, It's prolly best to acknowledge that without Frances copyright laws this project along with many others would've been killed by lawyers.

How are French copyright laws responsible for this?

Glad to hear this.

ffmpeg is one of these "Too Important to Fail" libraries.

I'll lay odds that billions of dollars rely on it, and it's an open-source tool.

This is creating bad incentives - now the billions of dollars relying on that have no interest in fixing the issue and they'll do the same for other projects.

Or … we could look at it as a type of “Local Loop Unbundling,” ensuring that it acts as a neutral resource for all.

This is great news, but simultaneously disappointing that it is necessary. FFmpeg underpins tens of billions of dollars in value for the companies that use it, yet the support from the community is proportionally minuscule.

It's weird when you consider how much money corporations waste on complete bs that they can't set aside a tiny amount to support the software they use.

So weird, it sounds like a conspiracy theory.

What's the conspiracy? Why would a company support a Free software project if it didn't have to, out of the good of its heart?

For the same reason that they hire cleaners to clean the windows of their buildings and pay people to check cables in their data centers. To make sure that their business isn't going to fall apart.

It's necessary because anytime there's talk about the original authors of open source software making money rather than big corps everyone starts frothing at the mouth and forking things to protect the leeches.

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