[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] financial sustainability Plan A (SPI)

[Kieran Kunhya]

Hi,

On Thu, 26 Oct 2023 at 12:41, Thilo Borgmann via ffmpeg-devel <
ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org> wrote:

> Of course. FFmpeg has a donations account. So the money is already there
> and
> already used for the reimbursement requests. Whatever we spent it for
> needs to
> be decided by the community. Spending more money instead of just watch it
> growing is a good thing. That this will lead to more "disaster" is an
> assumption
> without basis. Even if this does happen and fails, its still better than
> not
> having even tried.
>

Reimbursement requests for clearly defined things like travel costs with
receipts, or hardware that the project owns is in no way comparable to
consulting work, contracts, statements of work etc. And the current swscale
proposal is far from this too.


> Also, you just advertised FFmpeg and asked for more financial support in
> your
> talk at Demuxed [1] - so I figure your prefered way of doing that would be
> to
> channel money into some company without the community being involved?
>

Actually if you watched the presentation, I said big companies need to
support maintenance (not the same as bounties) of FFmpeg by hiring
employees to work full time as they do with Linux Kernel maintainers. Or
failing that they can donate to the community - but as you know well the
numbers we have are not enough to hire full time maintainers.

Agreement via mailing list for money is a recipe for disaster. What we need
are clear statements of work that are voted on by TC.
We can't even agree on patch reviews, throwing money into the mix is
throwing gasoline into the fire.

And since you also advertised explicitly for FFlabs - what is your relation
> to
> FFlabs? I own 25% of that company and I am not aware of any relationship.
> You
> just did advertise FFlabs because... FFlabs exists? FFlabs is a company
> co-owned
> by some FFmpeg developers, it's not FFmpeg nor can it represent it or act
> on its
> behalf.
>

I linked to the consulting page and also to FFlabs which as far as I know
is the only company offering an SLA on FFmpeg.
If others existed I would have included them.


> As soon as we pay developers via SPI it can become a good zero-trust
> environment
> for donators to offer tasks & money to FFmpeg and handle the money flow
> via SPI.
> The donators can be sure that their issues are handled properly in the
> project
> (on the ML) and do not flow away into some other sink and the developers
> can be
> sure to get their money from SPI because the offer is public and backed by
> the
> FFmpeg SPI account. Sounds like a quite trustworthy and most importantyl
> transparent way to handle things and build up trust in potential donators
> that
> the money they spent actually end up with FFmpeg.
>

Do you really think the way SPI funding is managed currently matches your
description?
Stefano approves by saying "Approved on my side, pending Michael's
approval."
This is not at all a community driven process where one person can veto
everything.

> I don't think developers should be paid via SPI for this reason.
>
> I think supporting FFmpeg developers via SPI fits perfectly into what we
> have
> SPI for in the first place - an independant entity that handles the
> community
> funds with absolute objectivity and no intrinsic interest whatsoever. In
> contrast to any company, including (my own-ish) FFlabs.
>

If there is disagreement (which will be inevitable) SPI will not step in.
Money is only going to make our current ML drama situation worse.

Regards,
Kieran Kunhya