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

[Hendrik Leppkes]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 6:31 PM Michael Niedermayer
<michael at niedermayer.cc> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 07:19:41PM +0200, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> > Le tiistaina 31. lokakuuta 2023, 18.58.57 EET Michael Niedermayer a écrit :
> > > > That's not a credible solution for a library. All reverse dependency
> > > > developers would disable that before they ship affected FFmpeg versions,
> > > > or worse, just stop updating their vendored FFmpeg.
> > >
> > > If its announced and we point to the commit, maybe half the minor users
> > > will remove it, maybe most of the bigger ones. If its not announced
> > > noone would remove it. companies do not audit the FFmpeg commits.
> > > They would remove it after seeing it but at that point it did what it
> > > intended to to, inform users again, like i said thats hypothetical and
> > > controversal. But basically doing the same as companies which put
> > > advertisements in without asking either creator nor viewer.
> >
> > How do you show ads without a GUI? Hijack the video signal from the decoder?
>
> In this very very hypothetical idea ...
> it would not be a add, but a simple information box shown briefly that says
> something like "decoded with ffmpeg.org, donate if you enjoy" / "encoded with ffmpeg.org, donate if you enjoy"
>

If as a professional user of a decoder library, it starts putting in
an ad or a watermark or whatever you want to call it, even if briefly,
i'm looking for a new decoder library, or will venture to remove the
message instantly.
And if that wasn't enough to completely destroy the projects
reputation, if you then try to hide it by randomizing or whatever, so
that testing before deployment doesn't see it, that definitely will.

This is not acceptable behavior for a decoder. And no "exposure" due
to bad press will actually yield you a benefit. Companies won't pay
you, because that doesn't get rid of the message. They'll pay an
engineer to disable it.

- Hendrik