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

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Sun, Oct 29, 2023 at 04:35:35PM +0200, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Le 28 octobre 2023 21:01:57 GMT+03:00, Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc> a écrit :
> >On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 07:21:03PM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> >> Hi ronald
> >> 
> >> On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 12:43:15PM -0400, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> >> > Hi Thilo,
> >> > 
> >> > On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 11:31 AM Thilo Borgmann via ffmpeg-devel <
> >> > ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org> wrote:
> >> > 
> >> > > What this is about, is to set up a way to properly spend the SPI money
> >> > > aside
> >> > > from travel & hw. Why we should not do it because some companies
> >> > > beurocracy, I
> >> > > cannot see.
> >> > >
> >> > 
> >> > I sincerely don't think the above description is what Kieran meant when he
> >> > talked about sustainability at Demuxed, which this thread seems to be a
> >> > response to.
> >> 
> >> a quick reply here. I have not watched kierans presentation from demuxed yet.
> >> So theres absolutly no chance anything i wrote till now can be a respone to
> >> it.
> >
> >some more words about what the intend of this plan was, again not a respone
> >to any presentation of anyone else
> >
> >Donations from people vs companies: both really.
> 
> I think Ronald's point is that you need to pick one, and clarify which it is, because as Ronald explained, it's unlikely that a *good* plan could address both (conversely a plan that tries to address both is probably poor and flawed).
> 
> In other words, if you want to cover both cases, you need two separate plans.

you are correct, i agree here but this is a RFC so its not a final
plan.

i think for the donations from users the real question is how many
of our users can we reach to explain them that they are using FFmpeg
and a tiny donation would help us alot.
if thats only a few thousand users then this will not work


> 
> And unfortunately, I do believe that Ronald is correct in pointing out that big companies will want oversight in exchange for money. This is very much counter to the current project setup, which (depending whom you ask) is governed by the GA, or by Fabrice Bellard through his delegates.
> 
> This is not to say that these corporate wishes should or should not be accomodated. It is just an observation of those wishes.

if i look at spi.txt, it says
"SPI needs a contract in place which describes the work to be done. "

so if we have someone do some payed development work be that one time or
continous. There would be a contract that says what is going to be done.
That also would have been approved by the community or GA or whatver and
the company paying would have a say in whats in that contract, really
limited by what we are ok with and what the law allows


> 
> >Peoples donations would only matter if we can increase awareness of people
> >using FFmpeg. We have over a billion users but they dont know it.
> >if each user gives us 1cent per year our sustainability is solved.
> >So driving awareness alone would solve this already, even if only 0.1%
> >of users would donate 10$ per year that would do.
> 
> How do you plan to gain visibility from those billion users? Call me pessimistic but this has been a known problem for 20+ years, and I have yet to glimpse a credible solution.

It depends on the community. If the commuity wants to do it
Just look at some online service which annoy you telling you to disable a add blocker
we could detect a specific usecase we intend to target and print a simple message
once that will not annoy the user a 2nd time
This is very controversal and iam not sure if 99% are against it or find it funny.
Iam just awnsering the "how it can be done" not saying iam in favor or against


[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities
are wrong. -- Voltaire
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