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How could ffmpeg maintainers kill three major AWS product lines with an email?

zxspectrum1982 1y ago
Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in other open source projects.
- portaouflop 1y ago
  Wouldn’t that only affect new versions and current versions are still licensed under the old license ?
- NewsaHackO 1y ago
  But if it gets relicensed, they would still be able to use the current version. Amazon definitely would be able to fund an independent fork.
  - wewtyflakes 1y ago
    Sounds like it would be a lot of churn for nothing; if they can fund a fork, then they could fund the original project, no?
    - arrowleaf 1y ago
      If they can fund a fork, they can continue business as usual until the need arises
      - zrm 1y ago
        A fork is more expensive to maintain than funding/contributing to the original project. You have to duplicate all future work yourselves, third party code starts expecting their version instead of your version, etc.
        rs186 1y ago
        Nobody said the fork cannot diverge from the original project.
    - cortesoft 1y ago
      They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork. It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.
      - edoceo 1y ago
        If they want that level of control, reimburse for all the prior development too. - ie: buy that business. As it stands, they're just abusing someone's gift. Like jerks.
        rolandog 1y ago
        There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.
        renewiltord 1y ago
        That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either. In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.
        bigiain 1y ago
        I reckon this is an impedance mismatch between "Open Source Advocacy" and Open Source as a programming hobby/lifestyle/itch-to-scratch that drives people to write and release code as Open Source (of whatever flavour they choose, even if FSS and/or OSF don't consider that license to qualify as "Open Source"). I think Stallmann's ideological "allowing users to run, modify, and share the software without restrictions" stance is good, but I think for me at least that should apply to "users" as human persons, and doesn't necessarily apply to "corporate personhood" and other non-human "users". I don't see a good way to make that distinction work in practice, but I think it's something that if going to become more and more problematic as time goes on, and LLM slop contributions and bug reports somehow feed into this too. I was watching MongoDB and Redis Labs experiments with non-OSF approved licences clearly targeted at AWS "abusing" those projects, but sadly neither of those cases seemed to work out in the long term. Also sadly, I do not have any suggestions of how to help...
    - 6510 1y ago
      With a bit of needless work the fixes could be copied and they would still end up funding them.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      Funding ffmpeg also essentially funds their competitors, but a closed fork in-house doesn't. Submitting bugs costs less than both, hence why they still use ffmpeg in the first place.
    - xxs 1y ago
      They can't - it's LGPL 2.1. So the fork would be public essentially.
  - schainks 1y ago
    It still takes expensive humans to do this so they are incentivized to use the free labor.
    - NewsaHackO 1y ago
      Yes, definitely. I was just saying that if the license ever did change, they would move to an in-house library. In fact, they would probably release the library for consumer use as an AWS product.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - deaddodo 1y ago
    And then the argument for refusing to just pay ffmpeg developers gets even more flimsy. The entire point here is to pay for the fixes/features you keep demanding, else the project is just going to do as it desires and ignore you. More and more OSS projects are getting to this point as large enterprises (especially in the SaaS/PaaS spheres) continue to take advantage of those projects and treat them like unpaid workers.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      Not really. Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg. It's a dumb reason, especially when there are CVE bugs like this one, but that's how executives think.
      - Kim_Bruning 1y ago
        But their competitors also fund them, which makes it a net positive sum.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg. So the premise here is that AWS should waste their own money maintaining an internal fork in order to try to make their competitors do the same thing? But then Google or Intel or someone just fixes it a bit later and wisely upstreams it so they can pay less than you by not maintaining an internal fork. Meanwhile you're still paying the money even though the public version has the fix because now you either need to keep maintaining your incompatible fork or pay again to switch back off of it. So what you've done is buy yourself a competitive disadvantage. > that's how executives think. That's how cargo cult executives think. Just because you've seen someone else doing something doesn't mean you should do it. They might not be smarter than you.
        illuminator83 1y ago
  - 8note 1y ago
    something more dangerous would be "amazon is already breaking the license, but the maintainers for now havent put in the work to stop the infringement"
  - eptcyka 1y ago
    Oh the irony - we don't want to pay for ffmpeg's development, but sure can finance a fork if we have to.
- astrange 1y ago
  ffmpeg cannot relicense anything because it doesn't own anything. The contributors own the license to their code.
  - deaddodo 1y ago
    I don’t know about ffmpeg, but plenty of OSS projects have outlined rules for who/when a project-wide/administrative decision can be made. It’s usually outlined in a CONTRIB or similar file.
    - astrange 1y ago
      Doubtful that's enough for a copyright grant. You'd need a signed CLA.
      - deaddodo 1y ago
        No one said make it proprietary; there are other OSS licenses that would make ffmpeg non-viable for commercial usage.
        astrange 1y ago
        You need a copyright grant to change the license in any way.
        astrange 1y ago
        (Except for the part in the LGPL that lets you relicense it to later versions.)
  - colonwqbang 1y ago
    Relicensing isn't necessary. If you violate the GPL with respect to a work you automatically lose your license to that work. It's enough if one or two main contributors assert their copyrights. Their contributions are so tangled with everything else after years of development that it can't meaningfully be separated away.
mschuster91 1y ago
I'd guess Prime Video heavily relies on ffmpeg, then you got Elastic Transcode and the Elemental Video Services. Probably Cloudfront also has special things for streaming that rely on ffmpeg. The "kill it with an email" probably means that whoever said this is afraid that some usecase there wouldn't stand up to an audit by the usual patent troll mothercluckers. The patents surrounding video are so complex, old and plentiful that I'd assume full compliance is outright impossible.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  AWS MediaConvert as well which is a huge API (in surface it covers) which is under Elemental but is kinda it's own thing - willing to bet (though I don't know) that that is ffmpeg somewhere underneath. The API manual for it is nearly 4000 pages and it can do insane stuff[1]. I had to use it at last job(TM), it's not terrible API wise. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/mediaconvert/latest/apireference/mediaconvert-api.pdf https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/mediaconvert/latest/apirefe... CAUTION: big PDF.
  - bigiain 1y ago
    " ... and it can do insane stuff" That's a pretty good indicator it's likely just ffmpeg in an AWS Hoodie/Trenchcoat.
joshkel 1y ago
In a follow-up tweet, Mark Atwood eloborates: "Amazon was very carefully complying with the licenses on FFmpeg. One of my jobs there was to make sure the company was doing so. Continuing to make sure the company was was often the reason I was having a meeting like that inside the company." I interpret this as meaning there was an implied "if you screw this up" at the end of "they could kill three major product lines with an email."
- phkahler 1y ago
  Are you interpreting that as "if we violate the license, they can revoke our right to use the software" ?? And they use it in 3 products so that would be really bad. That would make sense to have a compliance person.
  - zinekeller 1y ago
    Possibly Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, and another one that escapes my mind (AWS-related?).
    - procflora 1y ago
      AWS for sure (Elemental maybe?), but could also be Ring.
      - bigiain 1y ago
        Yeah - Amazon Elastic Transcoder which they just shut down and replaced with Elemental MediaConvert is almost certainly just managed "ffmpeg as a Service" under the hood.
    - a_vanderbilt 1y ago
      And Blink. I used to contract with them a few years back, they all rely heavily on open source.
    - troupo 1y ago
      Twitch definitely. This whole brouhaha has been brewing for a while, and can be traced back to a spat between Theo and ffmpeg. In the now deleted tweet Theo thrashed VLC codecs to which ffmpeg replied basically "send patches, but you wouldn't be able to". The reply to which was --- start quote --- https://x.com/theo/status/1952441894023389357 https://x.com/theo/status/1952441894023389357 You clearly have no idea how much of my history was in ffmpeg. I built a ton of early twitch infra on top of yall. --- end quote --- This culminated in Theo offering a 20k bounty to ffmpeg if they remove the people running ffmpeg twitter account. Which prompted a lot of heated discussion. So when Google Project Zero posted their bug... ffmpeg went understandably ballistic
DragonStrength 1y ago
Open up an Amazon media app and navigate around enough, and you'll encounter a page with all their "Third Party Software Licenses." For instance, here's one for the Amazon Music apps, which includes an FFMpeg license: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201420340 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
- skrebbel 1y ago
  And? How does that give the ffmpeg authors a power over Amazon? (Hint: it doesn’t and the guy we’re discussing is spewing nonsense for maximum retweets)
- rossant 1y ago
  Is the idea that ffmpeg could change its license and wreak havoc?
loodish 1y ago
If you breach the LGPLv2/GPLv2 licence then you lose all rights to use the software. There's no penalty clause, there's no recovery clause. If you don't comply with the licence conditions then you don't have a licence. If you don't have a licence then you can't use the program, any version of the program. And if your products depend on that program then you lose your products. The theoretical email would be a notification that they had breached the licence and could no longer use the software. The obvious implication being that AWS was wanting to do something that went contrary to the restrictions in the GPL, and he was trying to convince them not to.

zxspectrum1982 1y ago

Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in other open source projects.

portaouflop 1y ago
Wouldn’t that only affect new versions and current versions are still licensed under the old license ?
NewsaHackO 1y ago
But if it gets relicensed, they would still be able to use the current version. Amazon definitely would be able to fund an independent fork.
- wewtyflakes 1y ago
  Sounds like it would be a lot of churn for nothing; if they can fund a fork, then they could fund the original project, no?
  - arrowleaf 1y ago
    If they can fund a fork, they can continue business as usual until the need arises
    - zrm 1y ago
      A fork is more expensive to maintain than funding/contributing to the original project. You have to duplicate all future work yourselves, third party code starts expecting their version instead of your version, etc.
      - rs186 1y ago
        Nobody said the fork cannot diverge from the original project.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork. It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.
    - edoceo 1y ago
      If they want that level of control, reimburse for all the prior development too. - ie: buy that business. As it stands, they're just abusing someone's gift. Like jerks.
      - rolandog 1y ago
        There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.
        renewiltord 1y ago
        That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either. In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.
        bigiain 1y ago
        I reckon this is an impedance mismatch between "Open Source Advocacy" and Open Source as a programming hobby/lifestyle/itch-to-scratch that drives people to write and release code as Open Source (of whatever flavour they choose, even if FSS and/or OSF don't consider that license to qualify as "Open Source"). I think Stallmann's ideological "allowing users to run, modify, and share the software without restrictions" stance is good, but I think for me at least that should apply to "users" as human persons, and doesn't necessarily apply to "corporate personhood" and other non-human "users". I don't see a good way to make that distinction work in practice, but I think it's something that if going to become more and more problematic as time goes on, and LLM slop contributions and bug reports somehow feed into this too. I was watching MongoDB and Redis Labs experiments with non-OSF approved licences clearly targeted at AWS "abusing" those projects, but sadly neither of those cases seemed to work out in the long term. Also sadly, I do not have any suggestions of how to help...
  - 6510 1y ago
    With a bit of needless work the fixes could be copied and they would still end up funding them.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    Funding ffmpeg also essentially funds their competitors, but a closed fork in-house doesn't. Submitting bugs costs less than both, hence why they still use ffmpeg in the first place.
  - xxs 1y ago
    They can't - it's LGPL 2.1. So the fork would be public essentially.
- schainks 1y ago
  It still takes expensive humans to do this so they are incentivized to use the free labor.
  - NewsaHackO 1y ago
    Yes, definitely. I was just saying that if the license ever did change, they would move to an in-house library. In fact, they would probably release the library for consumer use as an AWS product.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- deaddodo 1y ago
  And then the argument for refusing to just pay ffmpeg developers gets even more flimsy. The entire point here is to pay for the fixes/features you keep demanding, else the project is just going to do as it desires and ignore you. More and more OSS projects are getting to this point as large enterprises (especially in the SaaS/PaaS spheres) continue to take advantage of those projects and treat them like unpaid workers.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    Not really. Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg. It's a dumb reason, especially when there are CVE bugs like this one, but that's how executives think.
    - Kim_Bruning 1y ago
      But their competitors also fund them, which makes it a net positive sum.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg. So the premise here is that AWS should waste their own money maintaining an internal fork in order to try to make their competitors do the same thing? But then Google or Intel or someone just fixes it a bit later and wisely upstreams it so they can pay less than you by not maintaining an internal fork. Meanwhile you're still paying the money even though the public version has the fix because now you either need to keep maintaining your incompatible fork or pay again to switch back off of it. So what you've done is buy yourself a competitive disadvantage. > that's how executives think. That's how cargo cult executives think. Just because you've seen someone else doing something doesn't mean you should do it. They might not be smarter than you.
      - illuminator83 1y ago
- 8note 1y ago
  something more dangerous would be "amazon is already breaking the license, but the maintainers for now havent put in the work to stop the infringement"
- eptcyka 1y ago
  Oh the irony - we don't want to pay for ffmpeg's development, but sure can finance a fork if we have to.
astrange 1y ago
ffmpeg cannot relicense anything because it doesn't own anything. The contributors own the license to their code.
- deaddodo 1y ago
  I don’t know about ffmpeg, but plenty of OSS projects have outlined rules for who/when a project-wide/administrative decision can be made. It’s usually outlined in a CONTRIB or similar file.
  - astrange 1y ago
    Doubtful that's enough for a copyright grant. You'd need a signed CLA.
    - deaddodo 1y ago
      No one said make it proprietary; there are other OSS licenses that would make ffmpeg non-viable for commercial usage.
      - astrange 1y ago
        You need a copyright grant to change the license in any way.
        astrange 1y ago
        (Except for the part in the LGPL that lets you relicense it to later versions.)
- colonwqbang 1y ago
  Relicensing isn't necessary. If you violate the GPL with respect to a work you automatically lose your license to that work. It's enough if one or two main contributors assert their copyrights. Their contributions are so tangled with everything else after years of development that it can't meaningfully be separated away.

mschuster91 1y ago

I'd guess Prime Video heavily relies on ffmpeg, then you got Elastic Transcode and the Elemental Video Services. Probably Cloudfront also has special things for streaming that rely on ffmpeg. The "kill it with an email" probably means that whoever said this is afraid that some usecase there wouldn't stand up to an audit by the usual patent troll mothercluckers. The patents surrounding video are so complex, old and plentiful that I'd assume full compliance is outright impossible.

noir_lord 1y ago
AWS MediaConvert as well which is a huge API (in surface it covers) which is under Elemental but is kinda it's own thing - willing to bet (though I don't know) that that is ffmpeg somewhere underneath. The API manual for it is nearly 4000 pages and it can do insane stuff[1]. I had to use it at last job(TM), it's not terrible API wise. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/mediaconvert/latest/apireference/mediaconvert-api.pdf https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/mediaconvert/latest/apirefe... CAUTION: big PDF.
- bigiain 1y ago
  " ... and it can do insane stuff" That's a pretty good indicator it's likely just ffmpeg in an AWS Hoodie/Trenchcoat.

joshkel 1y ago

In a follow-up tweet, Mark Atwood eloborates: "Amazon was very carefully complying with the licenses on FFmpeg. One of my jobs there was to make sure the company was doing so. Continuing to make sure the company was was often the reason I was having a meeting like that inside the company." I interpret this as meaning there was an implied "if you screw this up" at the end of "they could kill three major product lines with an email."

phkahler 1y ago
Are you interpreting that as "if we violate the license, they can revoke our right to use the software" ?? And they use it in 3 products so that would be really bad. That would make sense to have a compliance person.
- zinekeller 1y ago
  Possibly Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, and another one that escapes my mind (AWS-related?).
  - procflora 1y ago
    AWS for sure (Elemental maybe?), but could also be Ring.
    - bigiain 1y ago
      Yeah - Amazon Elastic Transcoder which they just shut down and replaced with Elemental MediaConvert is almost certainly just managed "ffmpeg as a Service" under the hood.
  - a_vanderbilt 1y ago
    And Blink. I used to contract with them a few years back, they all rely heavily on open source.
  - troupo 1y ago
    Twitch definitely. This whole brouhaha has been brewing for a while, and can be traced back to a spat between Theo and ffmpeg. In the now deleted tweet Theo thrashed VLC codecs to which ffmpeg replied basically "send patches, but you wouldn't be able to". The reply to which was --- start quote --- https://x.com/theo/status/1952441894023389357 https://x.com/theo/status/1952441894023389357 You clearly have no idea how much of my history was in ffmpeg. I built a ton of early twitch infra on top of yall. --- end quote --- This culminated in Theo offering a 20k bounty to ffmpeg if they remove the people running ffmpeg twitter account. Which prompted a lot of heated discussion. So when Google Project Zero posted their bug... ffmpeg went understandably ballistic

DragonStrength 1y ago

Open up an Amazon media app and navigate around enough, and you'll encounter a page with all their "Third Party Software Licenses." For instance, here's one for the Amazon Music apps, which includes an FFMpeg license: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201420340 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

skrebbel 1y ago
And? How does that give the ffmpeg authors a power over Amazon? (Hint: it doesn’t and the guy we’re discussing is spewing nonsense for maximum retweets)
rossant 1y ago
Is the idea that ffmpeg could change its license and wreak havoc?

loodish 1y ago

If you breach the LGPLv2/GPLv2 licence then you lose all rights to use the software. There's no penalty clause, there's no recovery clause. If you don't comply with the licence conditions then you don't have a licence. If you don't have a licence then you can't use the program, any version of the program. And if your products depend on that program then you lose your products. The theoretical email would be a notification that they had breached the licence and could no longer use the software. The obvious implication being that AWS was wanting to do something that went contrary to the restrictions in the GPL, and he was trying to convince them not to.