Saying goodbye to FFmpegKit | Hacker News Reader

Saying goodbye to FFmpegKit

tanersener.medium.com

181 pointsericdiao96 comments

> However, in 2023, MPEG LA was acquired by Via-LA, and everything changed. When I reached out to Via-LA in late 2024 to confirm FFmpegKit’s position under their terms, I received no response.

The real reason. Greedy bastards, and the risk of your business being set on fire by greedy bastards, even if they don't have a right to anything - they can still threaten to waste your time and money and offer a shakedown instead.

I've never used FFmpegKit (I've mostly just used the command-line, or indirectly via yt-dlp and Handbrake) but just hearing about it now, the maintainer sounds like an awesome person who really went above and beyond to support free software, so hooray for them! I bet it was useful for thousands of other projects, and those people are all grateful too.

From the article, Via-LA just didn't respond to the author, that doesn't really say anything about their position. It's a bit premature to call them greedy bastard. The author is doing this out of an abundance of caution, not in response of a legal action.

Considering that MPEG-LA and in turn Via-LA only provides non-commercial licenses with the hardware which can encode/decode the codecs under their umbrella, and (Via-LA) stays silent on a matter so they can snipe people from the distance, they are the de-facto greedy ones.

ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254

If I write to the Mafia asking to confirm they won't burn my store to the ground, they won't write back saying "no".

They're not obligated to respond, and they enjoy the fear, uncertainty and doubt their non-response creates.

If I ask my city if they will enforce their explicitly written zoning policy against renting a single room to a tenant, they won’t write back. But they also have no intention of enforcing that policy.

It doesn’t make them evil…just bureaucratic.

Your city doesn't exist primarily to extract profits though, does it?

If the city bureaucracy doesn't exist primarily to provide continued employment to people of a certain class who can't or won't do something more productive, it's doing a pretty good impression of it. The purpose of a system is what it does and all that.

Having dealt with MPEG-LA before, it makes me so wildly angry that a company composed of nothing but lawyers can suck money out of any product that wants to use a widely supported, arguably critical video codec.

The process for reporting to them for sales is also horrible. Uploading excel spreadsheets to an ASP.NET backend that's barely holding together. It's minimal effort from them to leverage all possible legal action over you. Horrible.

As an artist, this sort of shit makes me apoplectic. I’m frustrated that society has no way to compensate people that do creative work for a living other than the same mechanism that virii like this extract money from other people’s work using a paper turnstile and heavy penalties for violations. And between the two kinds of entities, only one realistically even has the significant resources needed to engage the mechanism. I understand that a lot of folks in tech consider both of these usages to be largely equivalent but that’s a different conversation.

> I’m frustrated that society has no way to compensate people that do creative work for a living other than the same mechanism that virii like this extract money from other people’s work using a paper turnstile and heavy penalties for violations.

Steam, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, BandCamp, commissions... The creator economy is booming and is on the rise. I've seen some metrics say it's got a 40% CAGR.

MrBeast, PsychicPebbles, VivziePop, Joel Haver - all made brands for themselves. The currency is personal brand. Most of the creators I follow these days are indies, not big studios.

But even excepting that, you can always work for a big studio if you're not interested in the additional headache of working for yourself and building a personal brand. Gaming, film, and music are huge and there are companies hiring in these spaces.

> all made brands for themselves

Ah there's the magic word! You shouldn't have to be a "brand"... the people you listed are not who I would call "independent".

Capitalism is the root of evil to all this. Sorry.

Every single indie band I like is a brand.

Pardon my French, but get the stick out of your eye and lighten up a little bit about this.

Not everything should be "kumbaya, my lord" neighborhood arts and crafts, string beads, hillbilly woodworking, or stay at home mom Etsy finds. You can enjoy things that have their own distinctive brand identity. Where the artist becomes inseparable from the art.

Web comics, their own brands. Fan fiction authors, their own brands and followings. YouTubers and Twitch streamers, even the smallest of the small - duh. Brand. Bloggers. Columnists. Photographers. Even illustrators have their own brands. They don't want to be generic fungible goods. They want to be unique. That's what it is to be an artist and the name of the artist carries recognition, accolade, and following.

So sorry there's an element of marketing and self promotion involved, but that's the name of the business for everyone. If you don't like it, you can work for somebody else and follow their brand guidelines and direction.

> Every single indie band I like is a brand.

because they have to be.

> Not everything should be "kumbaya, my lord" neighborhood arts and crafts, string beads, hillbilly woodworking, or stay at home mom Etsy finds.

False dichotomy.

The commenter is not bemoaning that it is impossible to make a living as a creative (though it is difficult); they are bemoaning that the mechanisms of enforcing, in law, that what is yours is yours requires a substantial amount of capital and legal expertise. If Ubisoft, for example, were to steal the IP of an indie developer and integrate it into their own game, is there a realistic path for that developer to take to get the dividends of their creation from Ubisoft? Yes, technically. But how much money, time, and work will it take? And how can it possibly be fair, when Ubisoft has an entire legal division at their disposal who's job it is to make sure they don't have to pay, and the indie developer has to take time away from their job to do all of the same things?

Reasoning about the universe of commercial art based solely on the tiny consumer-facing facade doesn’t work. It’s even more detached than speaking confidently about restaurant management because you go out to eat a lot. At least 90% of the moving parts are totally invisible to the consumer. The markets for indie bands, fan art commission artists, product photographers, architecture photographers, VFX artists, comedy writers, 2D animators, beachside caricature artists, branding and identity designers, textile designers, industrial designers, technical artists, industrial jewelry designers, independent jewelry artists, live TV producers, motion designers, and fine art painters, just to name a few, share many challenges, but are far too different from each other to fall under your sweeping generalizations based entirely on your assumptions about the tiny slice of it that you see. Like most “common sense” oversimplified understandings of complex problems, the simplicity you see in this topic is rooted in your lack of understanding and knowledge rather than some unique ability to find a simple solutions to complex problems.

'MrBeast' please don't compare this nonsense to creativity. He's a business man, and an extremely dishonest one [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dslLBsHkVzE]. A genius at 'optimising' 'content' for 'the algorithm'. The man has not one creative or artistic bone in his body.

It's enormously disingenuous to compare the rise of hucksters like this to artists or creative professionals.

Further - gaming has just seen the greatest layoffs in history, as all the major studios and publishers attempt to reduce costs and leverage 'AI', since the games as a service model is winner takes all. Independent film is all but dead since the franchise film has taken the box office. And music, are you kidding? Spotify has so cucked musicians that it's actively replacing them with AI generated mush, trained on their work, and the economic disparity is so great there's nothing they can do about it - https://www.fastcompany.com/91170296/spotify-ai-music

Additionally, Mr. Beast and other “content creators” are really just the face of small-to-medium-sized companies with brands established in much lower-competition markets with much lower standards and almost certainly could not recreate that success today as indie YouTubers, etc. Beast had over 250 employees as of a 2023 interview with a former employee. At one point I saw more 3D generalist ads for positions in his thumbnails department than from most huge studios, and they’re not looking for one-off work from freelancers— they’ve got an established 3D pipeline set up and they’re looking for full time staff that have experience with it. For THUMBNAILS. So now, when you’re starting out, you’re competing for search results space and recommendations with corporate, or legacy-media-backed marketing agencies presenting themselves as independent creators. Good. Fucking. Luck.

The only naive “Kumbaya, my lord” perspective around here is that the current “creative” tooling the corporate tech sector is building is positive for humanity’s creative landscape, and they didn’t just take what used to be the largest and healthiest independent creative marketplace humanity has ever experienced and hand it directly to corporate entities and low-effort, low-value bullshit “content” hucksters.

You’re conflating “content creators you’re aware of” and the entire collection of industries that comprise commercial art. Indeed, the search engine optimizing celebrity influencer content creation market is booming— a lot of it either being backed by legacy media, re-using other people’s content directly, or being better at marketing AI knockoffs of other people’s content than the original creators. Do you think that any of those content creators hesitate for a second to use copyright protections against someone gaining popularity using their scripts/footage/audio, etc to make the same kind of content? Beyond that, most commercial art isn’t feasible to sell in those mediums. The people benefiting from this is so infinitesimally small compared to and not representative of the many commercial art markets at large— everything from concept artists to graphic designers to dancers— that it’s entirely forgivable to exclude it from analysis altogether, let alone basing your analysis on it. You might as well deem someone with a gunshot wound perfectly healthy based entirely on their hair.

The other direct-sell platforms you referenced have already been flooded by people bulk-creating AI knock-offs. The giant slop hose has already won the race to the bottom making it nearly impossible for people that aren’t already established to get started. It’s most obvious in stock photo markets, but in music, some of the creation tools specifically advertise generating output to avoid triggering copyright scanners.

And no, you can’t just go grab a job at the big studios because a) a lot of them are using, or assuming they’ll soon be able to effectively use, the same AI tools that everyone else is based in other peoples labor and eliminating FTEs, b) since so many commercial artists have been displaced by tech companies essentially selling their work, everybody— including former freelancers and indies— is shooting for the same dwindling set of jobs, and c) nobody in those industries is leaving their jobs because they know it might be the end of their career if they do.

I don’t expect you to understand the markets outside of your area of expertise, but I would appreciate your being less patronizing while you attempt to explain my career to me.

I'm no lawyer but I feel like a company shouldn't have standing to contest a patent if they can't demonstrate damages, like a product losing sales because someone else is selling a competing product using technology under their patent.

And "we paid for something and want ROI" are not damages. There's no legal right to profit from an investment. You gotta use it or lose it.

In this case though, licensing their code is their use of the product. Don't let your ire of patent trolls lump everyone together. I'm not saying MPEG/Via-LA are angels, but they own rights to code that is used by millions while holding active licenses with people using that code.

I don't have ire for patent trolls, they exist within the system they create. I have ire for the patent business because I've read and written a number of patent applications, and see the entire thing as mostly bogus.

Normally you can't win a lawsuit without proving damages. My overarching point is that buying IP with no intent to use it does not create damages when someone infringes it. And relicensing IP is not "using" the IP to me - you either use it, or lose it. Unless of course, you're the original author (and by author, I mean the humans, not businesses that paid them)

The point of IP laws is to protect creators and encourage development. When the resulting markets do the opposite you have to ask if the design of those laws is flawed, and I really believe that.

> relicensing IP is not "using" the IP to me - you either use it, or lose it. Unless of course, you're the original author (and by author, I mean the humans, not businesses that paid them)

If I come up with a brilliant new compression algorithm, but don't have the software development skills to make a robust production implementation, what difference does it make whether I hire someone to write that production implementation, license my algorithm to someone who writes that production implementation, or sell my patent rights to someone who writes that production implementation (or licenses my algorithm to someone else who does that)? Heck, given that software is fluffy abstract stuff rather than physical goods, would you consider selling a program to count, or is it only someone who makes a hardware device that uses the algorithm who gets to count?

So there's three cases here worth talking about.

1) You patent something, but don't do anything with it except enforce the patent.

2) You patent something, but the only thing you do with it is license others to use it, potentially hiring someone else to manage the licenses but you retain ownership.

3) You patent something, you sell the patent to someone else to do 2)

Cases 1 and 3 have significant negative effects on both technology and society that the law should prevent. Case 2 covers your brilliant new invention but don't bring it to market yourself and is fine.

The key notion here is that you cannot sell intellectual property. It's ephemeral. You can license it and create all sorts of creative license terms, but once you're dead or the timeline of exclusive rights runs out, or you personally stop "using" it (or all companies stop using it), the patent effectively expires because you can't claim damages if you or your license holders have not seen any negative impacts.

In a perfect world, "defensive" patent strategies and rent-seeking by middlemen would be prevented by construction. This maximizes the incentive to innovate and share ideas, instead of bottling them up. If you want true, exclusive rights to something, don't share it in a patent.

> Cases 1 and 3 have significant negative effects on both technology and society that the law should prevent. Case 2 covers your brilliant new invention but don't bring it to market yourself and is fine.

How are 2 and 3 meaningfully different as far as anyone outside is concerned though? If I own a field and I'm not a farmer, no-one cares much whether I rent it out to someone else to farm on or sell it to (either for some proportion of their income or for a straight up flat fee). Economically it's all the same - you can rent something or you can buy it funded with a loan, and your cash flows will be more or less identical.

My ire for patent trolls is distinct.

The patent "business" is just garbage. A company full of lawyers collecting rents on mathematical algorithms does not "promote the progress of science and useful arts".

I think there is still a place for patents, but most of the time they seem to just stifle innovation and increase the cost of everything.

Unfortunately, patent rights are quite literally the right to exclude others from doing things. That's it.

Patent owners don't even have the right to make the invention themselves (because it may infringe on other patents).

So your problem is fairly foundational.

The judiciary has decided to ignore the preamble "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". If that language was respected, the way parents currently work would be clearly unconstitutional.

'useful arts' in that era meant what we'd call 'trades skills' today.

'To promote the progress of science (total human knowledge) and skilled technical artisans.'

Arguably, given the pace of technical innovation, and the clear effects on independent artisans, there shouldn't be patents at all. Copyright should also be re-evaluated, and if it still exists (it's so very easy to copy anything these days), and targeted towards maximum cultural diffusion of expressions of ideas within pop-culture cycles (20 years sounds LONG for such a timescale).

Trade Marks, however, those are consumer protection and product reputation issues and call for registered (pay a fee to the government) marks that renew as long as paid.

I'm not a fan of patents, but i'm not sure this is fair.

That phrase had a fairly specific meaning back when it was written, and they seem to be hewing to it.

It does not match today's colloquial understanding for sure, but that doesn't mean they are ignoring it.

It seems really strange that a library that wraps FFMpeg is being discontinued due to patent concerns with the underlying codecs, but those codecs are only implemented in FFMpeg itself, which continues along without issues.

ffmpeg, VLC and its associated projects are hosted in France. There aren't any US companies for the MAFIAA to shakedown, and if they tried to file for software patent infringement in France, the French courts would tell them to fuck off.

So they go after ffmpeg's US-based users/customers instead.

Do French courts enforce patents differently?

France was one of the first countries in Europe to ban software patents, in 1968.

France is also a party to the European Patent Convention, which specifically states that programs for computers are not patentable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...

Software patents are mainly a US-only thing.

US people coming to complain about European regulations in 3... 2... 1...

The LPF tried to warn everyone. /r/stallmanwasright

https://web.archive.org/web/20031013020204/http://progfree.o...

There are over 300 French patents in the H.264 license pool, and the very first one looks like a software patent to me, and I suspect most of the rest are the software patents that you confidently claim don't exist.

Are those patents for Europe? I guess a French could file for a US patent, right?

Maybe the examiner erred in issuing it then, and it needs to be cancelled because it's non-patentable subject matter as per Article 52 of the European Patent Convention.

I don't know how I can be clearer about that. It's literally not allowed, and you think the first one you've looked at has somehow escaped the very direct statement that programs for computers are not patentable subject matter

Perhaps if you'll cite any of those French patents (I note you alluded to "over 300" but managed not to cite any), we can get started on the cancellations

The first patent I found was EP3975559 (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/08/b8/01/acb4bfe...)

The complete list of patents in the MPEG-LA for H.264 is here: https://www.via-la.com/wp-content/uploads/Final-February-1-2...

The first patent you found is Danish - though is issued in several jurisdictions simultaneously via the EPO.

And yes, it is carefully written to not imply it's patenting a computer program, and yet try to get the maximum "I'll sneak this past the examiners because I really want to patent computer programs" without actually breaching their direct rules about what are and aren't computer programs (and what is and isn't a technical solution, and what is and isn't novel).

So if you want to say "looks like a software patent", the EPO would disagree directly with you, as they literally followed their rules saying don't do that - but the adversary is also trying their best to get software-implementation-fucking patent claims despite those rules. I'd like the EPO to be even stricter, and reject even more claims.

I'm a little confused what your argument is, then. You claim that software is not patentable in the EU, but then accept that some companies manage to get software patented in EU countries by writing their patents creatively.

So... software is patentable in the EU, at least in some circumstances. That's the end result, even if technically it's not allowed.

Unless these patents in question don't actually cover video codec software, which it seems they do?

The ultimate test, of course, is if these patents would stand up in court. But it seems no one has challenged them? Which indicates to me that either a) people believes they would hold up in court, and so they don't try to challenge them, or b) no one is sure, and is afraid to find out. Either outcome has the end result of "software can be patented in the EU sometimes".

I'd say it's the difference between a country where stealing is a crime, but some people commit that crime anyway, and sometimes the stealing isn't detected, and sometimes it's detected but it's not worth the cost of prosecuting the thief... versus a country with laws like "steal all you want! it's not a crime at all! in fact we actively encourage it! stealing is great!"

jcranmer is trying to convince you that there is no difference between these two positions, because, technically, in both there is at least some stealing.

But they're not the same. Let's go back to the top-level question. Why is a US-based wrapper for a French library choosing to pre-emptively delete all binaries it has ever produced and completely shut down, out of fear of unstated legal actions, while the French library has been in active development for 25 years, and -- if software patents weren't explicitly illegal there -- would likely have been sued to oblivion by the same people who menace the USA.

Instead of trying to put words in my mouth, let me just say what I think:

I believe software patents are no more legal in the US than they are in the EU, and this is based on SCOTUS precedent in the US that makes the legal argument for software patents very sketchy. In a just world, that would mean that pretty much all of the MPEG-LA's patent portfolio should be worthless. But I suspect that in both the US and the EU, the fig leaf of "but I didn't patent the software algorithm, I patented the hardware running the software algorithm" is sufficient to get it granted and survive scrutiny to get it invalidated.

I don't have the time to look up the court case history of the EU--and I know that the EU is a civil law jurisdiction so the court case history isn't precedential in the same way it is in the US--but I would not be shocked if there have been cases that have upheld these software patents, despite the seemingly clear language in the treaties that software patents don't exist. Because the legal field is one wherein the "obvious" definition of software patent isn't necessarily the same as the legal definition.

The reality is that MPEG-LA positively asserts that it has a buttload of EU patents it can sic on your ass for violating, and were I being sued by them, I wouldn't be willing to bet that "but software patents are illegal!" is a winning defense.

If you were to look it up, you'd find the European Patent Office (EPO) runs its own courts; boards of appeal, like the USPTO PTAB/BPAI. It set precedents on itself with appeal decisions and opinions. However, it is the member states (party to the European Patent Convention (EPC)) that enforce the patents they allow the EPO to issue in their name, and they all have their own laws and courts. There has been a recent development where some of the member states entered into a unitary patent court agreement.

The EPO has widened and narrowed the scope of what it considers patentable, and that gives people trying to purposefully get a patent on something that is clearly software either more or less leeway. Obviously I'd like the EPO to be even less forgiving.

But I don't think we're going to get anywhere. The EPO neither has perfect enforcement of its no-software-patents rule, nor is it easily hoodwinked with This One Simple Trick of saying it's a hardware device. The reality is in the middle, and neither of us has a good set of comparative statistics or case studies to contrast the differing EPO and USPTO approaches, so we should probably stop.

But I stick by my original claim: I believe the reason ffmpeg and VLC have not been sued to oblivion is because they're legally based in France, where the MPEG-LA's practises aren't tolerated. The support of a "no software patents" country/government/society encouraged them to develop ffmpeg without fear; the fear we see on display here today in the USA.

> I believe the reason ffmpeg and VLC have not been sued to oblivion is because they're legally based in France, where the MPEG-LA's practises aren't tolerated. The support of a "no software patents" country/government/society encouraged them to develop ffmpeg without fear; the fear we see on display here today in the USA.

I strongly doubt that's the reason. Until recently, it was quite easy to sue anybody in your favorite court in the US on the flimsiest of grounds, and even after SCOTUS said "you need more than 'they sell things here' to establish jurisdiction and venue," the patent-friendly judge in West Texas seems to be trying his hardest not to listen. No, I suspect the reason is much simpler: an open source project doesn't hold enough money to be worth the cost it takes to litigate (on the order of millions of dollars).

Either those patents are invalid or they are not French.

Article L611-10:

... 2. Ne sont pas considérées comme des inventions au sens du premier alinéa du présent article notamment :

a) Les découvertes ainsi que les théories scientifiques et les méthodes mathématiques ;

b) Les créations esthétiques ;

c) Les plans, principes et méthodes dans l'exercice d'activités intellectuelles, en matière de jeu ou dans le domaine des activités économiques, ainsi que les programmes d'ordinateurs ;

d) Les présentations d'informations.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...

DeepL translation:

2. The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of the first paragraph of this Article

a) discoveries as well as scientific theories and mathematical methods ;

b) aesthetic creations

c) plans, principles and methods for carrying out intellectual activities, games or economic activities, as well as computer programs;

d) Information presentations.

My suspicion is that software is no less patentable in France (or the EU as a whole) than it is in the US. Which is to say, throw in a generic processor and it's kosher enough to get granted. (Even in the US, Alice says that "do it on a computer" isn't enough to get granted but... that's exactly what happens, and given the long, long list of European patents in the video codec space, it's clearly happening just as much in the EU).

My suspicion is that patent offices are accepting obvious invalid patents for money.

or, like everyone, they make mistakes.

People find it harder to notice mistakes that gain them money, and easier to notice mistakes that cost them money. It's almost magical.

Which is why you always present your patent as if it were a mechanical machine. Then in court you need to prove how their mechanism of instructions for a general purpose solver(software) is the same as your patent mechanism.

This is sort of a half-joke, But honestly I would not have a problem with software patents if they had to be filed in this manner. The problem I have is with patents that are "existing device (on a computer)" as if putting it on a computer was novel.

I feel that patents are a critical legal device. I think having economic exploitation protection for your novel mechanism is an important thing. However there are enough people exploiting the patent system itself that it does need some reform. However I am uncertain what that reform should be. A stricter interpretation of novel? a tighter interpretation of infringement? Honestly I am worried about the law of unintended consequences here.

> I think having economic exploitation protection for your novel mechanism is an important thing.

Sure. But if it's software: fuck off and use copyright. If people copy you, you're injured, you can show they copied you and obtain damages/injunctions. But if you want monopoly control over an idea, no matter who else comes up with it... that's rent-seeking.

Patents don't offer monopolies for fun, they're supposed to advance society by offering incentives for disclosure. The amount of incentive, and the likelyhood of non-disclosure was very different in the past, it certainly doesn't fit for computer software, so soceity shouldn't continue to offer that pact for computer software.

Part of me wish that there are teams in China or Russia who can take over the development and ignore all the idiotic demands from these associations.

Are you suggesting using ffmpeg in US is illegal? As far as I am aware there are plenty of US companies using ffmpeg.

Using ffmpeg is not illegal.

Any software you write, or even run, may or may not infringe some half-assed patent, and you will never know until the troll wielding it and deliberately trying to keep it hidden, pounces on you, usually demanding money, threatening to use their government-backed exclusive rights to their "invention" so you either pay what they ask, do what they ask, or they sue you for infringement and sometimes win. Larger companies have large troves of patents and they really don't care what's in them, they care that they have lots and you don't, and they can use them to crush you in court unless you give in to whatever they demand.

Some companies you know of may already have given in, and may already be paying licensing fees to patent holders. It sickens me.

I'm not suggesting, I'm telling you there is an entity, formerly MPEG-LA, now Via Licensing Corp, who maintain a pool of patents that supposedly claim exclusive rights to aspects of some of the video codecs implemented in FFMPEG.

If they hear you're making money, and you use video codecs -- ffmpeg's implementation or otherwise -- they may come to shake you down. They get to pick and choose who they accuse of patent infringement. They can do it at any time (before the expiry of the last patent in the pool). They can do it at the point where they'll have maximum leverage over you. Software patents give them that opportunity.

Should they get in touch with you, your response should be made in consultation with qualified lawyers.

https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html

> Q: Bottom line: Should I be worried about patent issues if I use FFmpeg?

> A: Are you a private user working with FFmpeg for your own personal purposes? If so, there is remarkably little reason to be concerned. Are you using FFmpeg in a commercial software product? Read on to the next question...

> Q: Is it perfectly alright to incorporate the whole FFmpeg core into my own commercial product?

> A: You might have a problem here. There have been cases where companies have used FFmpeg in their products. These companies found out that once you start trying to make money from patented technologies, the owners of the patents will come after their licensing fees. Notably, MPEG LA is vigilant and diligent about collecting for MPEG-related technologies.

"To get clarity, I consulted an IP law firm. Their review raised concerns about potential risks related to licensing and patents. They recommended retiring the project and removing older binaries as the safest option. They did suggest some alternative paths, but those options would have required significant time, effort, and money, neither of which I could commit."

Thanks to Taner Sener for putting in all the effort! I guess most technical people shudder at the mere thought of dealing with all the legal matters.

Paying contractors to support your free GitHub project is wild.

Open source is beautiful and broken at the same time.

I don’t see this being broken in the slightest! What’s the issue with paying someone to write code you don’t want to?

Feeling obligated to appease unseen internet freeloaders.

If you do it because you want it for your stuff, cool.

If you do it because you feel obliged to appease "the community" who takes for granted that you support them, that's a symptom of the broken model that is open source.

Has echos of the Linux for Apple Silicon guy last week who used to be a Wii modder, tired of the support tickets from entitled pirates, moved to a niche Linux distro, and discovered a similar sense of entitlement in the issue tracker.

In general, nothing, but it made me a bit sad that the maintainer believed he "owed" the community (likely 99% full of people who were using his work for free) to the point that he spent money for someone else to do work that he couldn't find time to do himself. Instead of just shuttering the project earlier, and saving that money.

I really hope the "significant sum" he paid was out of donations to the project, and not his own money. Even then, it sounds like he's poured a ton of his time and energy into the project over the years, so even if it was all donated money, he certainly could have kept it for himself without any moral/ethical concerns.

Ah, it's MPEG-LA again, the reason why we can't have nice things.

FTFY the laws that allow MPEG-LA to exist are the reason why we can't have nice things.

It can be both - just because it's legal for MPEG-LA to act that way it doesn't require them to do so

No, but human nature is such that all it takes is a handful of unscrupulous people who see laws that they can use to their financial advantage. We can certainly assign blame to the people who work for MPEG-LA/Via-LA, but ultimately there will always be organizations like that as long as the law allows or incentivizes that sort of thing.

If we care about outcomes, the only thing to do is get the law changed so companies like that can't exist. Not because they are banned, but because there's no business model there.

The ability to create limited-liability corporations at will encourages certain kinds of unethical behaviour, where you grab unethical nickels until you're hit by the steamroller of the law but still come out ahead. We should indeed be looking to get the law changed so companies like that can't exist; part of that should be reserving limited liability for entities that create a corresponding public interest benefit rather than handing it out like candy.

I’ve never used FFmpeg-kit—I always use FFmpeg from distro packages (Linux, Homebrew) or build it selectively—so I’m not sure how important it is. Is it just a thin wrapper around the FFmpeg C API for various platforms?

If that’s the case, software engineers relying on it should learn how to build FFmpeg from source and handle platform-specific challenges (especially on Android). The loss of the overall community support doesn’t seem that significant, right?

That said, whether someone uses FFmpeg-kit or builds FFmpeg manually, the legal risks remain the same. If they don’t understand codec patents (like x264 and MPEG-LA) or GPL/LGPL obligations, they could face lawsuits or be forced to release their code under GPL. The real issue isn’t FFmpeg-kit—it’s whether developers actually understand these legal implications.

Ah, patent rights, when even legality of something can be debatable. How the heck is anyone supposed to follow the law if for every action A they have to ask lawyer if A is legal?

“Guy gets tired of doing whole ass job in his spare time”

Jk, thank you for your work!

Its unfortunate that more corporations don’t contribute to the same open source that they make use of for profit. (I know some do however).

FFMpegKit at https://github.com/arthenica/ffmpeg-kit is discontinued by the author

Why #1: not enough time and money.

The project had become a time sink, I get it. But that's exactly why OSS is a "What You See Is What You Get".

Normally I'd encourage any OSS maintainer in this position to just announce their intentions and let the community (as small as it might be) decide to either inherit maintenance and development of the project, or let it languish. I don't see any reason to close the repos so dramatically, depriving potential future readers of reaching the source code and improving upon it, as is the spirit of OSS.

The project had also become an actual cost, getting to the point of hiring contractors to make releases and please users (who would most probably have been unwilling to pay for that themselves, as my experience tells me most FOSS users are just freeloaders with no intention at all of supporting the project in any way or means). Well, what can I say, this conversation appears from time to time in HN. OSS maintainers need to have that special kind of ability to say "No" or even "I don't care" because otherwise the project (and its users) tend to absorb the author's attention, goodwill, wallet, and enthusiasm. It's very healthy, as a maintainer, to be able to ruthlessly point to the License file whenever someone complains and even _requires_ attention. The "Provided on an AS-IS BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND" phrase is wonderful.

I understand the author. The feeling of attachment and goodwill, the desire to show the highest attention to detail and quality support for a project is always there. We all experience it. But it's important to remember at all times that OSS is just an act of generosity to the universe, it cannot become a self-induced hell.

Why #2: legal concerns around potential litigations.

Yeah, I know it myself too: distributing FFmpeg binaries can be a legal risk if some codecs were enabled in the build.

Still no reason to shut everything down... or is it? My gut instinct for this is to "just" (I know, not a trivial change, but not astronomically complicated either) change to a "provide your own FFmpeg executable, please" model. Then, proceed with abandoning the project, as per the previous point.

Or just move everything to an anonymous Chinese Git provider.. and forget about receiving legal threats in there (just half-joking!)

I was under the impression you can't ship FFMPEG in an app on iOS/tvOS/iPadOS anyway given FFMPEG is licensed as LGPL.

While there might be incompatibilities with GPL and the App Store due to Apple’s insistence that developers must accept Apple’s terms to run Xcode and apps on developer devices, LGPL and other open source licenses are generally compatible with the App Store and Apple’s licenses. You can ship programs that use open source or are themselves open source within closed ecosystems by providing source code to end users via a website linked to within credits within the app. This distinction is because LGPL in particular permits more usage than GPL, allowing you to use the library in non-open source apps or those licensed under different terms, so ffmpeg has been somewhat adopted by a variety of open and closed source apps when a shared codebase is desired or particular codecs or functionality is required. That said, Apple themselves would prefer that you use their audio/video frameworks, due to device performance optimization, binary sizes, licensing and ecosystem lock-in. As far as I know, ffmpeg has adopted some of these Apple optimizations when appropriate frameworks are detected and configured at compile time.

How do I relink a random app on the app store with my own version an LGPL library? This is what it comes down to.

Isn't it bundled with chrome?

I think contacting patent trolls about anything like their opinion on legal matters about existing projects is a huge mistake. It only gives them the idea whom to shake down (namely you, since you contacted them)! It also probably makes it easier for them to claim that you knew about their patents when they come to shake you down. Don't feed the trolls!

I had never heard of ffmpeg until yesterday. In fact, I just Googled the term because I _still_ wasn't sure what it was beyond a dependency required to utilize a huggingface model I was testing. And now here we are...

Farewell FFmpegKit. You will be missed.

Every media processing or delivery service you've interacted with in the last decade is a lib-ffmpeg wrapper, including broadcast TV, streaming, or anything remotely related to re-encoding video. I'm only being slightly hyperbolic, FFMpeg is ubiquitous.

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