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> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send

by jbk 5y ago

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone through all the hoops to get paid (PO, billing, invoices, registering to large companies is a lot of paperwork, tbh, but well..) and we try and bill small to large companies that depends on those projects. And FFmpeg and x264 are the core of the online video. So I did exactly what Filippo is saying we should do. But the result is really not impressive. Seriously, asking for money for support from those companies feels like we're pulling the nails, even if their full business depends on it. Getting 30-50k$ from those companies for support for one year can be very challenging, long or leading to nowhere at all. So, large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech.

keyle 5y ago
That's interesting hey. Just imagine though, how does a company define what is "the core of the tech" and imagine the arguments in meetings between legal and engineering defining those terms. The way this industry has evolved is a complete dumpster fire, where the dudes that glue the pieces together are paid 10X the value the dudes that actually built the hard part!
H8crilA 5y ago
You need a proper "asshole" in such organizations that will go and threaten complete lack of support if the bill isn't paid. Of course there is a lot more detail in such negotiations, but the fact is that he/she will be facing similar "assholes" from the side of the copros. The entire thing is essentially just a game of standard capitalism. You have to know how to play that game, though. FFmpeg should be able to pull multiple $M per year easily from all the major corporations that use it. For comparison, $1M is the total yearly cost of ~3 average engineers at FAANGs. And most, if not all of them, use FFmpeg quite seriously.
- jbk 5y ago
  > You need a proper "asshole" in such organizations that will go and threaten complete lack of support if the bill isn't paid. That's the point, they don't pay, and they don't get support. But they still complain when there is a major CVE. > For comparison, $1M is the total yearly cost of ~3 average engineers at FAANGs. I wish we got that...
  - bogwog 5y ago
    1) Create a funding report newsletter for FFMPEG 2) When funding is low, big scary exclamation marks all over the place 3) Include a bulleted list of doomsday scenarios showing what could happen to YOU if a bug/vulnerability is found 4) Add a picture of a sad kitten or crying baby for good measure Now just subscribe all of the non-tech business people at organizations that use FFMPEG, and wait for them to panic. (Make sure that they need to call you to unsubscribe from the newsletter, especially if they work at the New York Times)
    - justinclift 5y ago
      > Now just subscribe all of the non-tech business people at organizations that use FFMPEG ... Don't do that bit unless you're sure it's not illegal in your (and their) jurisdiction. Spam being a thing, and there being laws against it.
      - bogwog 5y ago
        Easy solution, update the FFMPEG license with something like: > By using this software, you agree to subscribe to our monthly newsletter (I was joking btw, in case that wasn't clear)
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      >Now just subscribe all of the non-tech business people at organizations Ah, if only one could "just" get a mass of people's attention and send the message
  - 5y ago
mfer 5y ago
> So, large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech. Companies usually have a reason to keep their expenses low. Sometimes they are a public company with fiscal responsibilities. A startup will only have so much runway and is likely trying to reduce expenses. Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free?
- jbk 5y ago
  > Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free? See the article...
  - mfer 5y ago
    I was responding to the parent comment not the article. The article makes great point. It essentially talks about a services and support business around open source. Some have been doing this for decades. When you have contracts and support at a cost you aren't doing the work for free. The article is talking about running open source like a business rather than a volunteer situation. That means, you're not doing everything for free.
    - jbk 5y ago
      > It essentially talks about a services and support business around open source. Which is _exactly_ what we are doing...
      - cxr 5y ago
        This comment is pretty disingenuous. (I personally found it a bit obnoxious.) The person you're responding to made it very clear that they were responding to your conclusion that "large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech". The fact that you have support and services available isn't a "gotcha!" that refutes the point they are making, which is that given that there is also a zero-cost "product" available, then (unsurprisingly) prospective customers prefer that one instead.
bdcravens 5y ago
Would following an open core model work better, like it has for Hashicorp, Sidekiq, Tailwind, etc? Also, would focusing more on the low 4 figures result in more revenue? I feel the crowd sensitive to open source has that kind of spending authority, but once you get into the enterprise amounts, it's out of our reach to effect change.
- wpietri 5y ago
  That could work if the cost per sale were sufficiently low. But unless companies set up some sort of low-overhead system for putting that kind of money into open-source projects, I can't see it working. From what I hear, most devs can't just say, "We use project X a lot, so I'm going to fill out their web form right now and expense a $1k annual donation."
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    Those projects aren't donation-based. They are open core (they have an upgraded version that builds upon the open source version, adding desired value that is worth paying for)
- jbk 5y ago
  > Would following an open core model work better, like it has for Hashicorp, Sidekiq, Tailwind, etc? Yes, I think this might be a better model, indeed. But I did not start either of those projects, I came on board later; and those models are difficult to back-fit into an existing project.
  - wila 5y ago
    I don't think it matters much that you didn't start the projects, you are the one who is responsible for them now. That is the part that counts. If the project improves by making a difficult change then that is still your choice to make. Sure some people will complain, but there is always someone that complains when things change.
- ozfive 5y ago
kazinator 5y ago
Throwing money at some outside parties will not ensure that your in-house developers aren't carelessly in including snippets of code from the wild into your product.
StreamBright 5y ago
It is really not that hard with the right licensing. Offer your FOSS project with the meanest anti-corporation license you can find (AGPL?) which is not going to bother your user base but it is going to be a major hurdle for any corporation and then offer the software with a corporate friendly license for 100.000 / year. Wouldn't this work?
- coldpie 5y ago
  You run into problems when there are contributors other than yourself.
  - StreamBright 5y ago
    Could you elaborate?
    - midasuni 5y ago
      Ffmpeg’s code is owned by hundreds of people, you’d have to get them all to agree to relicense.
      - StreamBright 5y ago
        So it is possible just hard.
        midasuni 5y ago
        Some are dead, the copyright will have passed on in their wills to next of kin.
      - amelius 5y ago
        Not if you only change the license of the encompassing project, and leave the license of the sub-projects intact. Corporations are too addicted to plug-and-play software to be switching away to those sub-projects; also they'd lose the benefit of the maintenance (you could choose a new license once you maintain parts of the code).
Klonoar 5y ago
Wasn't there some YC company that was trying to act as a sales agent/middle-entity for this kind of situation? If not YC, they at least were on HN at one point. Curious if anyone knows.
- rrdharan 5y ago
  TideLift is the one I know of, I believe there have been others…
- naveen99 5y ago
  Not yc, but there is http://openteams.com/ http://openteams.com/ by the founder of numpy. disclaimer, I invested in it out of a fund.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
It aint going to happen, have you read some of the contracts linked to opensource, it will be a minority who make money from it. For example, I could use opensource internally, add features to it but I dont have to submit those changes back to the main source for others to use. Not only that who is going to police it? Its not like there is some magic open source police who will police my computer is there?!? So sure whilst the statement is true that Open Source runs most of the internet, the companies using it like Facebook or Google are not under any legal obligation to submit any changes back to the public domain for the greater good under some of those contracts. Even MS has some API's which come very close to mirroring Open Source functionality which makes me question MS is this legal! Open Source is just naïve charity, much like the UK Govt exploited the charity of the public by helping along a Weekly 8pm clap for NHS workers on a Thursday night during Covid Lockdowns. A weekly clap aint going to pay the bills and the rich will say anything to get out of handing over money. Hard lesson but its the truth, they would spend on PR Image control than pay bills IMO. So sorry, Open Source is something people can practice on and not get paid for except in a consulting role at best.
- f1refly 5y ago
  > For example, I could use opensource internally, add features to it but I dont have to submit those changes back to the main source for others to use. Not only that who is going to police it? Its not like there is some magic open source police who will police my computer is there?!? There is nothing to police. You making changes and not releasing them is perfectly within your rights. You can even distribute binaries with your changes legally. > So sure whilst the statement is true that Open Source runs most of the internet, the companies using it like Facebook or Google are not under any legal obligation to submit any changes back to the public domain for the greater good under some of those contracts. That depends. Both named companies have a global ban for anything using the AGPL license family. Except from that, you might be right that they aren't obligated to distribute their changes. You might find, however, that they do so anyways. It's much easier to merge your changes upstream than to maintain an internal fork indefinetly. And by merging the changes upstream everyone else profits. You seem to have a very warped view of what open source software and free software is about, and what rights the users may have or not have.
DethNinja 5y ago
Why not change the license to a revenue share agreement with a cap on total amount of revenue? For example, if a company uses ffmpeg on their products and product generates a yearly revenue of 1m then they will pay you 1k. Current open source agreements do nothing to help smaller companies or the maintainers and honestly I find it stupid and destructive. Charge larger companies more depending on their revenue and let small size companies with less revenue basically use it for free. Isn’t this more ethical than letting FAANG use these software for free?
- hparadiz 5y ago
  I really don't understand this mentality. This is what we've all been fighting for since the 90s. A free (as in beer) and open stack of software that anyone can pull off the shelf and use. So many commercial platforms rely not just on ffmpeg and vlc but also on nginx, php, python, nodejs, linux, mariadb, and everything else you can imagine. We also pay for some very niche things that are simply not available from the open source community. If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable. A bunch of people would also lose their jobs in the process. At my company we have revenue sharing so the idea of having to cut out a piece of the pie for an open source project would not be popular among staff. Most of them aren't even in tech.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    > If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable. Unfortunately, building a business on a limited resource that is -currently- "free," is not a particularly wise decision. VideoLAN and ffmpeg are amazing tools, but a lot of folks have made a lot of money on wrappers (some of which, are eye-wateringly expensive). I'd be unsurprised to find a number of license violations in some of these wrappers. History is filled with examples of people making money on resources that are not sustainable. These folks make a lot of money, until they wipe out the resources. OS is a limited resource.
  - pizza 5y ago
hncurious 5y ago
What's the largest company that uses FFmpeg and has refused? What did they say?
- jbk 5y ago
  > What's the largest company that uses FFmpeg and has refused? What did they say? I won't give names, but some very large cloud providers and some very large chips vendors.
toss1 5y ago
Perhaps the better way to get paid is to include a small and well-throttled cryptocurrency miner in the library you are open-sourcing, as a require-to-run part of the license. No invoicing, no approvals, it runs, you get paid in fairly direct proportion to the actual run time. This might actually be a real use-case, not that I think about it (of course, then there will be a war to strip it out, violating the license, etc.)
dilyevsky 5y ago
Out of curiosity - do you have actual sales person? Bc I think that maybe the problem…
spaetzleesser 5y ago
“Getting 30-50k$ from those companies for support for one year can be very challenging, long or leading to nowhere at all.” Do you have reps that can wine and dine high level people? From my observation this is where the money is.
jayp1418 5y ago
Check out https://artlessdevices.com/ https://artlessdevices.com/
thoraway66 5y ago
Yeah my problem with Filippo’s perspective is companies aren’t delivering what they promise either. It’s not as if altruistic motives, are what drives big corp. Open source often originates in big corp; k8s, Rust, and all the ML … none of them are exactly wart free or blowing minds as promised. Just the next evolution of a big corp financed mess from the 90s. The response to big corp complaints is they get what they pay for. And since austerity for the masses, all your agency are belong to us, fuck big corp
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
Thanks for sharing, Couldn't have asked for someone with better authority for an open-source project vital for both business and end-users; Payments from the latter can be excused as they're largely poor but we need better ways to make the greedy corporations pay. Many open-source project maintainers wouldn't go to the length of setting up companies like you've done, The paper work and compliance don't cut slack for building an open-source product. Perhaps there's a need-gap for services which maintain those for open-source projects and acts as a middle-men between the maintainers and the Account Payable of companies?
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
> and I've gone through all the hoops to get paid (PO, billing, invoices, registering to large companies is a lot of paperwork, tbh, but well..) and we try and bill small to large companies that depends on those projects. I see an opportunity to create a "create-a-company"-as-a-service, to help tons of other maintainers to do this with ease.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Why not just have an intermediate company that handles the donation/support aspects? I mean, we already have Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/ and for other content creators the likes of Patreon also work out nicely. Two examples, off the top of my head: 1) Here's how Open Collective looks, for jMonkeyEngine (a lovely Java game engine that's also a bit underfunded and underutilized): https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine 2) Also, here's the Patreon of Godot (a more hyped and better funded engine): https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://www.patreon.com/godotengine Why would large enterprises not just use a tool like that, if they already use the likes of AWS or other IaaS/PaaS/SaaS offerings? But i definitely agree that a lot of open source is underfunded and as a consequence many can't work on it full time or even every day, because things are dire financially otherwise: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html Not everyone has cushy jobs that make them $100k a year, i make closer to $21k in Europe now, about which i wrote on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings It feels to me that perhaps the solution here is to have something like a bot on GitHub/GitLab, that adds a comment to issues: "If you'd like to express to the maintainers how important this issue is and draw more attention to it, then submit a payment here: ... Payments so far: ... (possibly with messages by supporters)" Most people don't care about Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors or whatever, they just want to make feature requests or bug reports. If their attention is captured and the ability to make their own request/report more visible is offered to them as a part of that process, maybe things would be a bit better? I've definitely heard the sentiment expressed that micropayments have the potential to improve how we interact with others on the web in some ways, i'm just not sure how viable that is.
amelius 5y ago
Change the license. Make it so that large companies have to pay, and small companies can still use it for free.
- hiq 5y ago
  You're saying that they should make their software proprietary to solve the problem of FOSS maintenance. That's forgetting the implicit requirement that it should remain FOSS.
  - iandanforth 5y ago
    I don't believe there's any requirement that it should remain FOSS. In fact the situation provides a strong argument that FOSS is missing a key piece as it is currently conceived.
  - amelius 5y ago
    It's still FOSS, except if you are making millions using it and the entire issue becomes a luxury problem. That's what FOSS should mean anyway. The old definition can be renamed into exploitationware.
    - hiq 5y ago
      > It's still FOSS, except if you are making millions using it and the entire issue becomes a luxury problem. I guess we can discuss what should be, but AFAICT it's just not FOSS according to the OSI or the FSF.

by jbk 5y ago

keyle 5y ago

That's interesting hey. Just imagine though, how does a company define what is "the core of the tech" and imagine the arguments in meetings between legal and engineering defining those terms. The way this industry has evolved is a complete dumpster fire, where the dudes that glue the pieces together are paid 10X the value the dudes that actually built the hard part!

H8crilA 5y ago

You need a proper "asshole" in such organizations that will go and threaten complete lack of support if the bill isn't paid. Of course there is a lot more detail in such negotiations, but the fact is that he/she will be facing similar "assholes" from the side of the copros. The entire thing is essentially just a game of standard capitalism. You have to know how to play that game, though. FFmpeg should be able to pull multiple $M per year easily from all the major corporations that use it. For comparison, $1M is the total yearly cost of ~3 average engineers at FAANGs. And most, if not all of them, use FFmpeg quite seriously.

jbk 5y ago
> You need a proper "asshole" in such organizations that will go and threaten complete lack of support if the bill isn't paid. That's the point, they don't pay, and they don't get support. But they still complain when there is a major CVE. > For comparison, $1M is the total yearly cost of ~3 average engineers at FAANGs. I wish we got that...
- bogwog 5y ago
  1) Create a funding report newsletter for FFMPEG 2) When funding is low, big scary exclamation marks all over the place 3) Include a bulleted list of doomsday scenarios showing what could happen to YOU if a bug/vulnerability is found 4) Add a picture of a sad kitten or crying baby for good measure Now just subscribe all of the non-tech business people at organizations that use FFMPEG, and wait for them to panic. (Make sure that they need to call you to unsubscribe from the newsletter, especially if they work at the New York Times)
  - justinclift 5y ago
    > Now just subscribe all of the non-tech business people at organizations that use FFMPEG ... Don't do that bit unless you're sure it's not illegal in your (and their) jurisdiction. Spam being a thing, and there being laws against it.
    - bogwog 5y ago
      Easy solution, update the FFMPEG license with something like: > By using this software, you agree to subscribe to our monthly newsletter (I was joking btw, in case that wasn't clear)
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    >Now just subscribe all of the non-tech business people at organizations Ah, if only one could "just" get a mass of people's attention and send the message
- 5y ago

mfer 5y ago

> So, large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech. Companies usually have a reason to keep their expenses low. Sometimes they are a public company with fiscal responsibilities. A startup will only have so much runway and is likely trying to reduce expenses. Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free?

jbk 5y ago
> Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free? See the article...
- mfer 5y ago
  I was responding to the parent comment not the article. The article makes great point. It essentially talks about a services and support business around open source. Some have been doing this for decades. When you have contracts and support at a cost you aren't doing the work for free. The article is talking about running open source like a business rather than a volunteer situation. That means, you're not doing everything for free.
  - jbk 5y ago
    > It essentially talks about a services and support business around open source. Which is _exactly_ what we are doing...
    - cxr 5y ago
      This comment is pretty disingenuous. (I personally found it a bit obnoxious.) The person you're responding to made it very clear that they were responding to your conclusion that "large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech". The fact that you have support and services available isn't a "gotcha!" that refutes the point they are making, which is that given that there is also a zero-cost "product" available, then (unsurprisingly) prospective customers prefer that one instead.

bdcravens 5y ago

Would following an open core model work better, like it has for Hashicorp, Sidekiq, Tailwind, etc? Also, would focusing more on the low 4 figures result in more revenue? I feel the crowd sensitive to open source has that kind of spending authority, but once you get into the enterprise amounts, it's out of our reach to effect change.

wpietri 5y ago
That could work if the cost per sale were sufficiently low. But unless companies set up some sort of low-overhead system for putting that kind of money into open-source projects, I can't see it working. From what I hear, most devs can't just say, "We use project X a lot, so I'm going to fill out their web form right now and expense a $1k annual donation."
- bdcravens 5y ago
  Those projects aren't donation-based. They are open core (they have an upgraded version that builds upon the open source version, adding desired value that is worth paying for)
jbk 5y ago
> Would following an open core model work better, like it has for Hashicorp, Sidekiq, Tailwind, etc? Yes, I think this might be a better model, indeed. But I did not start either of those projects, I came on board later; and those models are difficult to back-fit into an existing project.
- wila 5y ago
  I don't think it matters much that you didn't start the projects, you are the one who is responsible for them now. That is the part that counts. If the project improves by making a difficult change then that is still your choice to make. Sure some people will complain, but there is always someone that complains when things change.
ozfive 5y ago

kazinator 5y ago

Throwing money at some outside parties will not ensure that your in-house developers aren't carelessly in including snippets of code from the wild into your product.

StreamBright 5y ago

It is really not that hard with the right licensing. Offer your FOSS project with the meanest anti-corporation license you can find (AGPL?) which is not going to bother your user base but it is going to be a major hurdle for any corporation and then offer the software with a corporate friendly license for 100.000 / year. Wouldn't this work?

coldpie 5y ago
You run into problems when there are contributors other than yourself.
- StreamBright 5y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - midasuni 5y ago
    Ffmpeg’s code is owned by hundreds of people, you’d have to get them all to agree to relicense.
    - StreamBright 5y ago
      So it is possible just hard.
      - midasuni 5y ago
        Some are dead, the copyright will have passed on in their wills to next of kin.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Not if you only change the license of the encompassing project, and leave the license of the sub-projects intact. Corporations are too addicted to plug-and-play software to be switching away to those sub-projects; also they'd lose the benefit of the maintenance (you could choose a new license once you maintain parts of the code).

Klonoar 5y ago

Wasn't there some YC company that was trying to act as a sales agent/middle-entity for this kind of situation? If not YC, they at least were on HN at one point. Curious if anyone knows.

rrdharan 5y ago
TideLift is the one I know of, I believe there have been others…
naveen99 5y ago
Not yc, but there is http://openteams.com/ http://openteams.com/ by the founder of numpy. disclaimer, I invested in it out of a fund.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

It aint going to happen, have you read some of the contracts linked to opensource, it will be a minority who make money from it. For example, I could use opensource internally, add features to it but I dont have to submit those changes back to the main source for others to use. Not only that who is going to police it? Its not like there is some magic open source police who will police my computer is there?!? So sure whilst the statement is true that Open Source runs most of the internet, the companies using it like Facebook or Google are not under any legal obligation to submit any changes back to the public domain for the greater good under some of those contracts. Even MS has some API's which come very close to mirroring Open Source functionality which makes me question MS is this legal! Open Source is just naïve charity, much like the UK Govt exploited the charity of the public by helping along a Weekly 8pm clap for NHS workers on a Thursday night during Covid Lockdowns. A weekly clap aint going to pay the bills and the rich will say anything to get out of handing over money. Hard lesson but its the truth, they would spend on PR Image control than pay bills IMO. So sorry, Open Source is something people can practice on and not get paid for except in a consulting role at best.

f1refly 5y ago
> For example, I could use opensource internally, add features to it but I dont have to submit those changes back to the main source for others to use. Not only that who is going to police it? Its not like there is some magic open source police who will police my computer is there?!? There is nothing to police. You making changes and not releasing them is perfectly within your rights. You can even distribute binaries with your changes legally. > So sure whilst the statement is true that Open Source runs most of the internet, the companies using it like Facebook or Google are not under any legal obligation to submit any changes back to the public domain for the greater good under some of those contracts. That depends. Both named companies have a global ban for anything using the AGPL license family. Except from that, you might be right that they aren't obligated to distribute their changes. You might find, however, that they do so anyways. It's much easier to merge your changes upstream than to maintain an internal fork indefinetly. And by merging the changes upstream everyone else profits. You seem to have a very warped view of what open source software and free software is about, and what rights the users may have or not have.

DethNinja 5y ago

Why not change the license to a revenue share agreement with a cap on total amount of revenue? For example, if a company uses ffmpeg on their products and product generates a yearly revenue of 1m then they will pay you 1k. Current open source agreements do nothing to help smaller companies or the maintainers and honestly I find it stupid and destructive. Charge larger companies more depending on their revenue and let small size companies with less revenue basically use it for free. Isn’t this more ethical than letting FAANG use these software for free?

hparadiz 5y ago
I really don't understand this mentality. This is what we've all been fighting for since the 90s. A free (as in beer) and open stack of software that anyone can pull off the shelf and use. So many commercial platforms rely not just on ffmpeg and vlc but also on nginx, php, python, nodejs, linux, mariadb, and everything else you can imagine. We also pay for some very niche things that are simply not available from the open source community. If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable. A bunch of people would also lose their jobs in the process. At my company we have revenue sharing so the idea of having to cut out a piece of the pie for an open source project would not be popular among staff. Most of them aren't even in tech.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable. Unfortunately, building a business on a limited resource that is -currently- "free," is not a particularly wise decision. VideoLAN and ffmpeg are amazing tools, but a lot of folks have made a lot of money on wrappers (some of which, are eye-wateringly expensive). I'd be unsurprised to find a number of license violations in some of these wrappers. History is filled with examples of people making money on resources that are not sustainable. These folks make a lot of money, until they wipe out the resources. OS is a limited resource.
- pizza 5y ago

hncurious 5y ago

What's the largest company that uses FFmpeg and has refused? What did they say?

jbk 5y ago
> What's the largest company that uses FFmpeg and has refused? What did they say? I won't give names, but some very large cloud providers and some very large chips vendors.

toss1 5y ago

Perhaps the better way to get paid is to include a small and well-throttled cryptocurrency miner in the library you are open-sourcing, as a require-to-run part of the license. No invoicing, no approvals, it runs, you get paid in fairly direct proportion to the actual run time. This might actually be a real use-case, not that I think about it (of course, then there will be a war to strip it out, violating the license, etc.)

dilyevsky 5y ago

Out of curiosity - do you have actual sales person? Bc I think that maybe the problem…

spaetzleesser 5y ago

“Getting 30-50k$ from those companies for support for one year can be very challenging, long or leading to nowhere at all.” Do you have reps that can wine and dine high level people? From my observation this is where the money is.

jayp1418 5y ago

Check out https://artlessdevices.com/ https://artlessdevices.com/

thoraway66 5y ago

Yeah my problem with Filippo’s perspective is companies aren’t delivering what they promise either. It’s not as if altruistic motives, are what drives big corp. Open source often originates in big corp; k8s, Rust, and all the ML … none of them are exactly wart free or blowing minds as promised. Just the next evolution of a big corp financed mess from the 90s. The response to big corp complaints is they get what they pay for. And since austerity for the masses, all your agency are belong to us, fuck big corp

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

Thanks for sharing, Couldn't have asked for someone with better authority for an open-source project vital for both business and end-users; Payments from the latter can be excused as they're largely poor but we need better ways to make the greedy corporations pay. Many open-source project maintainers wouldn't go to the length of setting up companies like you've done, The paper work and compliance don't cut slack for building an open-source product. Perhaps there's a need-gap for services which maintain those for open-source projects and acts as a middle-men between the maintainers and the Account Payable of companies?

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

> and I've gone through all the hoops to get paid (PO, billing, invoices, registering to large companies is a lot of paperwork, tbh, but well..) and we try and bill small to large companies that depends on those projects. I see an opportunity to create a "create-a-company"-as-a-service, to help tons of other maintainers to do this with ease.

KronisLV 5y ago
Why not just have an intermediate company that handles the donation/support aspects? I mean, we already have Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/ and for other content creators the likes of Patreon also work out nicely. Two examples, off the top of my head: 1) Here's how Open Collective looks, for jMonkeyEngine (a lovely Java game engine that's also a bit underfunded and underutilized): https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine 2) Also, here's the Patreon of Godot (a more hyped and better funded engine): https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://www.patreon.com/godotengine Why would large enterprises not just use a tool like that, if they already use the likes of AWS or other IaaS/PaaS/SaaS offerings? But i definitely agree that a lot of open source is underfunded and as a consequence many can't work on it full time or even every day, because things are dire financially otherwise: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html Not everyone has cushy jobs that make them $100k a year, i make closer to $21k in Europe now, about which i wrote on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings It feels to me that perhaps the solution here is to have something like a bot on GitHub/GitLab, that adds a comment to issues: "If you'd like to express to the maintainers how important this issue is and draw more attention to it, then submit a payment here: ... Payments so far: ... (possibly with messages by supporters)" Most people don't care about Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors or whatever, they just want to make feature requests or bug reports. If their attention is captured and the ability to make their own request/report more visible is offered to them as a part of that process, maybe things would be a bit better? I've definitely heard the sentiment expressed that micropayments have the potential to improve how we interact with others on the web in some ways, i'm just not sure how viable that is.

amelius 5y ago

Change the license. Make it so that large companies have to pay, and small companies can still use it for free.

hiq 5y ago
You're saying that they should make their software proprietary to solve the problem of FOSS maintenance. That's forgetting the implicit requirement that it should remain FOSS.
- iandanforth 5y ago
  I don't believe there's any requirement that it should remain FOSS. In fact the situation provides a strong argument that FOSS is missing a key piece as it is currently conceived.
- amelius 5y ago
  It's still FOSS, except if you are making millions using it and the entire issue becomes a luxury problem. That's what FOSS should mean anyway. The old definition can be renamed into exploitationware.
  - hiq 5y ago
    > It's still FOSS, except if you are making millions using it and the entire issue becomes a luxury problem. I guess we can discuss what should be, but AFAICT it's just not FOSS according to the OSI or the FSF.