[FFmpeg-user] Yes or No? About the processing pipeline.

[Rob Hallam]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2025 at 13:09, Phil Rhodes via ffmpeg-user
<ffmpeg-user at ffmpeg.org> wrote:
>  Everything Mark is saying in this email is true.

Everything? Even the trivially-disprovable-for-decades old saw about
'you can't make money writing FOSS software' ?

It's bizarre that FOSS is held up as an example of failure, never
succeeding, much worse than commercial software etc given the internet
is pretty near all hosted on Linux stacks, Android is Linux based.

Remind me- how many billions were lost due to Crowdstrike? How many
ads and tracking are inserted into the Windows OS? If you stop paying
a subscription to Adobe, what happens to software like Adobe Photoshop
/ Illustrator- can you keep doing your graphic design job, or do they
just stop working? The list of antifeatures and dark patterns is a
mile long.

Asserting proprietary software has users' interests at heart and is
magically run better than FOSS projects is make-believe.

Or as Reindl Harald more succinctly put it:

> On Thursday 19 June 2025 at 13:03:49 BST, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:

> proven as nonsense

> It is not something that can possibly happen until the world of free software figures out that the purpose of software is to do work for humans. (...)  Fixing that inconsistency will require people to make decisions about how things work, and impose those decisions on people.

Folks who work on Free software do so either at the behest of their
employer or to do things that they want to do. If you want to convince
them to change their approach, it's wise to consider their
motivations. Statements which amount to 'FOSS sucks' probably aren't
not good at winning hearts and minds or convincing them your viewpoint
is right- in fact it gets people like me who would otherwise agree
that usability of ffmpeg could be improved and that there's room for
improvement in the governance of various projects to disagree with
you.

On the other hand, those statements *are* good for starting arguments
on user mailing lists.

If your heart is set on carping about how terrible FOSS is, then
employing / contracting someone to make the changes you desire remains
an option; and it's also worth noting that this is an option in FOSS
which it isn't in proprietary software.

So if you don't pay someone to do things your way, all you have left
are words- they better be good ones.

Cheers,
Rob