Re: [FFmpeg-devel] Sovereign Tech Fund

[Anton Khirnov <anton@khirnov.net>]

Quoting Michael Niedermayer (2024-01-28 04:25:49)
> There can be no late objections here to any project suggestions.
> Objections must be before a project suggestion is submitted to STF,
> objections after that cannot be considered!

Self-imposed restrictions like these at the very least need a GA vote
IMO.

> Also once the person doing the work reaches the agreed milestone.
> She will submit an invoice with stefano and my help to SPI/STF.
> (in the unlikely case of a dispute on reaching a milestone
>  it would be decided by the technical committee if the milestone
>  has been reached from FFmpegs point of view)

Unlikely? I believe you are overlooking and/or trivializing the most
serious problems that need to be addressed before we can submit any
applications and not have it end in disaster.

These are, IMO:

1) How does the project protect itself from pre-approving some code that
   does not exist yet? This is not just some theoretical danger, it's
   easily possible that some project sounds good in theory, but actually
   implementing it comes with so many gotchas and caveats that it ends
   up being not worth it. Or there are fundamental technical
   disagreements about the specific way it's been implemented. Both
   cases exist in our history.

2) How do developers protect themselves from spending vast amounts of
   time on work they may not get paid for? As per 1), we may easily run
   into fundamental technical disagreements which result in the work
   having to be scrapped or redone entirely.

   It's also very hard to accurately estimate the amount of work
   required to do something. What do we do when someone spends a month
   working before realizing the project needs 5x more time than it's
   budgeted for?

3) Who exactly will be judging what amount of money is appropriate for
   what amount of work performed? How will we avoid conflicts of
   interest, or endless bikesheds over who is getting too much money for
   too little work? We just bikeshud a thread to death over rather
   little money, now imagine what would happen with ten times the
   amount.

Contrary to the overall mood of this thread so far, I hope these issues
can be overcome and some useful work sponsored successfully. But they
need to be taken seriously first.

I'd also like to ask Jonatas whether anything requires the projects to
be owned by individuals. Were I to propose a project, I'd much rather it
went through FFlabs than myself individually.

Cheers,
-- 
Anton Khirnov
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