[FFmpeg-devel] Sovereign Tech Fund

[Kieran Kunhya]

On Sun, 28 Jan 2024 at 19:20, Jonatas L. Nogueira <jesusalva at spi-inc.org>
wrote:

> That's not a problem at all; because you can divide the work into discrete
> pieces after it's done (on the invoice), just like liberal professionals
> (eg. accountants, lawyers, administrators, etc.)
>

As an open source project we can't give developers de-facto unbounded time
to work on something. It's not the same as accountants and lawyers. They
know roughly how long a set of accounts or a legal operation will take from
experience. These changes are one-off.

Many of the maintenance projects in FFmpeg can't be easily split up into
the simple examples you provide. FFmpeg is hugely coupled, one change in
code like YUVJ affects a lot of unrelated things. It's not at all easy to
cost this work.

The threading changes took the best part of a year and are still ongoing.
This does not lend itself well to SoW/bounties.

Kieran