Re: [FFmpeg-devel] Sovereign Tech Fund

[Michael Niedermayer <michael@niedermayer.cc>]

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On Sun, Feb 04, 2024 at 03:38:43PM +0100, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Le 4 février 2024 14:41:15 GMT+01:00, Michael Niedermayer <michael@niedermayer.cc> a écrit :
> >Hi
> >
> >As said on IRC, i thought people knew it, but ‘the same person as before’ is Thilo.
> >
> >Ive updated the price design suggestion for the merge task, its 16€ / commit limited to 50k€
> >this comes from looking at pauls fork which has around 500 commits in 2 months thus
> >250 commits per month, 12 months, and if we allocate 50k that end with roughly 16€ / commit
> >if activity stays equal.
> 
> It's very different if we're talking about librempeg or some other unspecified fork. I could make a fork that removes MMX et al, and claim that I'm merging a fork.

There are so many reasons why this wouldnt work
(first you would have to lie, i dont think you would,
 then it would not be left that way on the wiki,
 not being sent to STF that way
 and not being accepted by STF and more)

But assuming one could get away with that in the short term
Why would anyone do something like this to destroy our all opertunity
to obtains grants in the future ?


> 
> >The task has ATM no developer on it. If a developer adds himself, he can change teh task
> >and specify what he proposes to merge.
> >
> >I am totally perplexed why every dot on every i is such a big thing.
> 
> That is the whole point of a statement of work. And I agree that it's tedious and possibly outright annoying...
> 
> Indeed I don't think that a semiformal open-source community with a lot of strong and varied opinions will carry such dotting of all i's very effectively. That has been one of the arguments for delegating this to a contracting IT company rather than to FFmpeg-devel and SPI.

If the FFmpeg team can make decissions about what to fund then we do not need
any contracting IT company.

OTOH If the FFmpeg team is not able to make decissions, thats a far bigger
problem and it needs to be understood and corrected
But not only this

"delegating this to a contracting IT company" really means having a random
CEO make the decissions about FFmpeg instead of the GA or community.
It is unlikely this will be accepted by the GA. And if accepted it would
be the end of FFmpeg. We would have not even sold FFmpeg we would have given
it for free to some company. Because whoever controlls the income of developers
effectively controlls the project.
An emloyee has to do what she is being told be her employer. So if the main developers
become employees payed to work on FFmpeg that would hand FFmpeg to some CEO on a
silver plate,
This would change FFmpeg from a Free software project to a commercial company.
I do NOT agree to this, and i belive many others also do not agree.

I am happy if we can get people payed continuously from grants and other sources
but never should FFmpeg give up its autonomy

Also we have "a lot of strong and varied opinions" but IMHO that is not the problem here.
The problem is distrust.
Using an "contracting IT company" will make this worse, First
we will not agree on it and if we do, we will end with a fork, whoever is not
"friends" with the CEO of that company will leave.

SPI or a similar entity gives us the transparency where a group of people
who distrust each other can move forward without the need to trust a 3rd party
Everyone can add their entry to the wiki, everyone has the same rights to
edit it. Everyone elected the TC.

I dont think a failure of SPI-STF will result in the money going next time to
a contracting IT company.

We have the opertunity to move forward together here.
Or we can choose not to move forward
Or we can choose not to do it together
Thats fundamentally the choices. In a mathematical sense, there are no other choices

I favor moving forward together!

thx

[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein

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