[FFmpeg-devel] Re: Soliciting sponsorship (was: WIP: avfilter: add Bungee audio stretch filter (PR #20697))

[Kieran Kunhya via ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org>]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 11:32 AM Nicolas George via ffmpeg-devel
<ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org> wrote:
>
> michaelni (HE12025-10-13):
> > Also you would have to convince the community, that we want this. iam
> > not sure how the community would think about it, but for example you
> > could offer to donate a percentage of your profits from this to
> > ffmpeg.
>
> Hi. I procrastinated replying about soliciting sponsorships, but if it
> looks like that I cannot anymore. Also, it must not be discussed in the
> dark of an obscure pull request, it needs to be seen on the
> mailing-list.
>
> If this is how us soliciting sponsorships looks like, then we must
> absolutely not do it.
>
> “Pay us and we will consider ignoring the qualms we have about the
> licensing issues of your contribution” is already very bad by itself. It
> is even badder when we realize it is only one step from “pay us and we
> will consider ignoring the qualms we have about the poor quality of your
> code”.
>
> Ideally, accepting contributions should be judged on the merits of the
> contribution itself: is the code beautiful? does it bring practical
> benefit to our users? Out of necessity we have to add: will this be
> properly maintained? But no more.
>
> We can solicit sponsorship, sure, but even the appearance that the money
> is a tit-for-tat for getting one's code into the project, getting
> excellent publicity and future maintenance work for cheap, would be
> extremely detrimental.
>

I agree.
There's is definitely a discussion to be had about the reasons FFmpeg
accepts a third-party lib. There are now many libs being proposed into
FFmpeg as marketing exercises.

I also think we should encourage people to maintain and more
importantly test their own repositories of FFmpeg with their open
source or proprietary libs (on Forgejo?).

Regards,
Kieran Kunhya
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