[FFmpeg-devel] Re: [RFC] Sponsors & Funding

["Rémi Denis-Courmont via ffmpeg-devel" <ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org>]

Hi,

Le 9 septembre 2025 11:19:26 GMT+03:00, Michael Niedermayer via ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org> a écrit :
>Hi Everyone
>
>The subject of funding and sponsors came up a few times recently.
>
>I think FFmpeg needs a clear guideline on this matter. To avoid
>confusion, to avoid disagreements and to ensure community members
>can point potential sponsors in an aggreed direction without hesitation.

We already went through that before. There are two ways that companies might credibly sponsor an OSS project on a big enough scale to actually hire developers:

1) Developers are hired or contracted independently. This is already happening.

2) A legal entity with clear oversight rules that sponsors can trust and influence collects funding from sponsors and decides whom to pay for what.

AFAIU, several people including you don't want (2), so that's that.

Companies might be willing to sponsor events, hardware, hosting, or just make small donations. They can already do that via SPI. But it is extremely unlikely that they would just give money to the GA, "the community" or whoever Fabrice Bellard happens to trust with FFmpeg.org at a given point in time (currently, you).

And correct if I am wrong but I doubt that the GA members want to handle negotiating compensation, deliverables and deadlines, writing contracts and tracking progress.

To put it another way:
- If you can get sponsored to do maintenance, do it. You don't need to, and shouldn't ask the GA or the community, for anything other than code review.
- If you can't, then you should be pondering why that is, and what can be done about it, not how hypothetical funding should be spent.
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