6 ms·

Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in othe

by zxspectrum1982 10mo ago

Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in other open source projects.

portaouflop 10mo ago
Wouldn’t that only affect new versions and current versions are still licensed under the old license ?
NewsaHackO 10mo ago
But if it gets relicensed, they would still be able to use the current version. Amazon definitely would be able to fund an independent fork.
- wewtyflakes 10mo ago
  Sounds like it would be a lot of churn for nothing; if they can fund a fork, then they could fund the original project, no?
  - arrowleaf 10mo ago
    If they can fund a fork, they can continue business as usual until the need arises
    - zrm 10mo ago
      A fork is more expensive to maintain than funding/contributing to the original project. You have to duplicate all future work yourselves, third party code starts expecting their version instead of your version, etc.
      - rs186 10mo ago
        Nobody said the fork cannot diverge from the original project.
  - cortesoft 10mo ago
    They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork. It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.
    - edoceo 10mo ago
      If they want that level of control, reimburse for all the prior development too. - ie: buy that business. As it stands, they're just abusing someone's gift. Like jerks.
      - rolandog 10mo ago
        There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.
        renewiltord 10mo ago
        That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either. In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.
        bigiain 10mo ago
        I reckon this is an impedance mismatch between "Open Source Advocacy" and Open Source as a programming hobby/lifestyle/itch-to-scratch that drives people to write and release code as Open Source (of whatever flavour they choose, even if FSS and/or OSF don't consider that license to qualify as "Open Source"). I think Stallmann's ideological "allowing users to run, modify, and share the software without restrictions" stance is good, but I think for me at least that should apply to "users" as human persons, and doesn't necessarily apply to "corporate personhood" and other non-human "users". I don't see a good way to make that distinction work in practice, but I think it's something that if going to become more and more problematic as time goes on, and LLM slop contributions and bug reports somehow feed into this too. I was watching MongoDB and Redis Labs experiments with non-OSF approved licences clearly targeted at AWS "abusing" those projects, but sadly neither of those cases seemed to work out in the long term. Also sadly, I do not have any suggestions of how to help...
  - 6510 10mo ago
    With a bit of needless work the fixes could be copied and they would still end up funding them.
  - zdragnar 10mo ago
    Funding ffmpeg also essentially funds their competitors, but a closed fork in-house doesn't. Submitting bugs costs less than both, hence why they still use ffmpeg in the first place.
  - xxs 10mo ago
    They can't - it's LGPL 2.1. So the fork would be public essentially.
- schainks 10mo ago
  It still takes expensive humans to do this so they are incentivized to use the free labor.
  - NewsaHackO 10mo ago
    Yes, definitely. I was just saying that if the license ever did change, they would move to an in-house library. In fact, they would probably release the library for consumer use as an AWS product.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- deaddodo 10mo ago
  And then the argument for refusing to just pay ffmpeg developers gets even more flimsy. The entire point here is to pay for the fixes/features you keep demanding, else the project is just going to do as it desires and ignore you. More and more OSS projects are getting to this point as large enterprises (especially in the SaaS/PaaS spheres) continue to take advantage of those projects and treat them like unpaid workers.
  - zdragnar 10mo ago
    Not really. Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg. It's a dumb reason, especially when there are CVE bugs like this one, but that's how executives think.
    - Kim_Bruning 10mo ago
      But their competitors also fund them, which makes it a net positive sum.
    - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
      > Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg. So the premise here is that AWS should waste their own money maintaining an internal fork in order to try to make their competitors do the same thing? But then Google or Intel or someone just fixes it a bit later and wisely upstreams it so they can pay less than you by not maintaining an internal fork. Meanwhile you're still paying the money even though the public version has the fix because now you either need to keep maintaining your incompatible fork or pay again to switch back off of it. So what you've done is buy yourself a competitive disadvantage. > that's how executives think. That's how cargo cult executives think. Just because you've seen someone else doing something doesn't mean you should do it. They might not be smarter than you.
      - illuminator83 10mo ago
- 8note 10mo ago
  something more dangerous would be "amazon is already breaking the license, but the maintainers for now havent put in the work to stop the infringement"
- eptcyka 10mo ago
  Oh the irony - we don't want to pay for ffmpeg's development, but sure can finance a fork if we have to.
astrange 10mo ago
ffmpeg cannot relicense anything because it doesn't own anything. The contributors own the license to their code.
- deaddodo 10mo ago
  I don’t know about ffmpeg, but plenty of OSS projects have outlined rules for who/when a project-wide/administrative decision can be made. It’s usually outlined in a CONTRIB or similar file.
  - astrange 10mo ago
    Doubtful that's enough for a copyright grant. You'd need a signed CLA.
    - deaddodo 10mo ago
      No one said make it proprietary; there are other OSS licenses that would make ffmpeg non-viable for commercial usage.
      - astrange 10mo ago
        You need a copyright grant to change the license in any way.
        astrange 10mo ago
        (Except for the part in the LGPL that lets you relicense it to later versions.)
- colonwqbang 10mo ago
  Relicensing isn't necessary. If you violate the GPL with respect to a work you automatically lose your license to that work. It's enough if one or two main contributors assert their copyrights. Their contributions are so tangled with everything else after years of development that it can't meaningfully be separated away.

Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in other open source projects.

portaouflop 10mo ago

Wouldn’t that only affect new versions and current versions are still licensed under the old license ?

NewsaHackO 10mo ago

But if it gets relicensed, they would still be able to use the current version. Amazon definitely would be able to fund an independent fork.

wewtyflakes 10mo ago
Sounds like it would be a lot of churn for nothing; if they can fund a fork, then they could fund the original project, no?
- arrowleaf 10mo ago
  If they can fund a fork, they can continue business as usual until the need arises
  - zrm 10mo ago
    A fork is more expensive to maintain than funding/contributing to the original project. You have to duplicate all future work yourselves, third party code starts expecting their version instead of your version, etc.
    - rs186 10mo ago
      Nobody said the fork cannot diverge from the original project.
- cortesoft 10mo ago
  They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork. It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.
  - edoceo 10mo ago
    If they want that level of control, reimburse for all the prior development too. - ie: buy that business. As it stands, they're just abusing someone's gift. Like jerks.
    - rolandog 10mo ago
      There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.
      - renewiltord 10mo ago
        That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either. In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.
        bigiain 10mo ago
        I reckon this is an impedance mismatch between "Open Source Advocacy" and Open Source as a programming hobby/lifestyle/itch-to-scratch that drives people to write and release code as Open Source (of whatever flavour they choose, even if FSS and/or OSF don't consider that license to qualify as "Open Source"). I think Stallmann's ideological "allowing users to run, modify, and share the software without restrictions" stance is good, but I think for me at least that should apply to "users" as human persons, and doesn't necessarily apply to "corporate personhood" and other non-human "users". I don't see a good way to make that distinction work in practice, but I think it's something that if going to become more and more problematic as time goes on, and LLM slop contributions and bug reports somehow feed into this too. I was watching MongoDB and Redis Labs experiments with non-OSF approved licences clearly targeted at AWS "abusing" those projects, but sadly neither of those cases seemed to work out in the long term. Also sadly, I do not have any suggestions of how to help...
- 6510 10mo ago
  With a bit of needless work the fixes could be copied and they would still end up funding them.
- zdragnar 10mo ago
  Funding ffmpeg also essentially funds their competitors, but a closed fork in-house doesn't. Submitting bugs costs less than both, hence why they still use ffmpeg in the first place.
- xxs 10mo ago
  They can't - it's LGPL 2.1. So the fork would be public essentially.
schainks 10mo ago
It still takes expensive humans to do this so they are incentivized to use the free labor.
- NewsaHackO 10mo ago
  Yes, definitely. I was just saying that if the license ever did change, they would move to an in-house library. In fact, they would probably release the library for consumer use as an AWS product.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
deaddodo 10mo ago
And then the argument for refusing to just pay ffmpeg developers gets even more flimsy. The entire point here is to pay for the fixes/features you keep demanding, else the project is just going to do as it desires and ignore you. More and more OSS projects are getting to this point as large enterprises (especially in the SaaS/PaaS spheres) continue to take advantage of those projects and treat them like unpaid workers.
- zdragnar 10mo ago
  Not really. Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg. It's a dumb reason, especially when there are CVE bugs like this one, but that's how executives think.
  - Kim_Bruning 10mo ago
    But their competitors also fund them, which makes it a net positive sum.
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg. So the premise here is that AWS should waste their own money maintaining an internal fork in order to try to make their competitors do the same thing? But then Google or Intel or someone just fixes it a bit later and wisely upstreams it so they can pay less than you by not maintaining an internal fork. Meanwhile you're still paying the money even though the public version has the fix because now you either need to keep maintaining your incompatible fork or pay again to switch back off of it. So what you've done is buy yourself a competitive disadvantage. > that's how executives think. That's how cargo cult executives think. Just because you've seen someone else doing something doesn't mean you should do it. They might not be smarter than you.
    - illuminator83 10mo ago
8note 10mo ago
something more dangerous would be "amazon is already breaking the license, but the maintainers for now havent put in the work to stop the infringement"
eptcyka 10mo ago
Oh the irony - we don't want to pay for ffmpeg's development, but sure can finance a fork if we have to.

astrange 10mo ago

ffmpeg cannot relicense anything because it doesn't own anything. The contributors own the license to their code.

deaddodo 10mo ago
I don’t know about ffmpeg, but plenty of OSS projects have outlined rules for who/when a project-wide/administrative decision can be made. It’s usually outlined in a CONTRIB or similar file.
- astrange 10mo ago
  Doubtful that's enough for a copyright grant. You'd need a signed CLA.
  - deaddodo 10mo ago
    No one said make it proprietary; there are other OSS licenses that would make ffmpeg non-viable for commercial usage.
    - astrange 10mo ago
      You need a copyright grant to change the license in any way.
      - astrange 10mo ago
        (Except for the part in the LGPL that lets you relicense it to later versions.)
colonwqbang 10mo ago
Relicensing isn't necessary. If you violate the GPL with respect to a work you automatically lose your license to that work. It's enough if one or two main contributors assert their copyrights. Their contributions are so tangled with everything else after years of development that it can't meaningfully be separated away.