Saying goodbye to FFmpegKit

Are those patents for Europe? I guess a French could file for a US patent, right?

You have a link to your blog in your profile, I don’t understand anything the top post is talking about and you’ve given little/no context. I can guess it’s hardware benchmarking related and I know I’m not particularly interested in that and I can opt to bounce away. And I did. I’m not asking you to go write a better intro to ease me into something I’m not interested in.

I had never used ffmpeg kit but it linked to their GitHub in the first sentence and I could quick grasp what it was from a ton of context clues. I had played with ffmpeg about 20 years ago. So kinda had some idea it was related to video, if I didn’t know that already, the “mpeg” part is a giveaway. But really I’m not interested in codecs or whatever, I am interested in the business/legal parts of software and that’s what they wrote about and got into it quickly which i appreciated.

Anyways, you seem to have an unpopular opinion that you don’t even practice yourself is my main criticism here.

> Every single indie band I like is a brand.

because they have to be.

> Not everything should be "kumbaya, my lord" neighborhood arts and crafts, string beads, hillbilly woodworking, or stay at home mom Etsy finds.

False dichotomy.

The commenter is not bemoaning that it is impossible to make a living as a creative (though it is difficult); they are bemoaning that the mechanisms of enforcing, in law, that what is yours is yours requires a substantial amount of capital and legal expertise. If Ubisoft, for example, were to steal the IP of an indie developer and integrate it into their own game, is there a realistic path for that developer to take to get the dividends of their creation from Ubisoft? Yes, technically. But how much money, time, and work will it take? And how can it possibly be fair, when Ubisoft has an entire legal division at their disposal who's job it is to make sure they don't have to pay, and the indie developer has to take time away from their job to do all of the same things?

You’re conflating “content creators you’re aware of” and the entire collection of industries that comprise commercial art. Indeed, the search engine optimizing celebrity influencer content creation market is booming— a lot of it either being backed by legacy media, re-using other people’s content directly, or being better at marketing AI knockoffs of other people’s content than the original creators. Do you think that any of those content creators hesitate for a second to use copyright protections against someone gaining popularity using their scripts/footage/audio, etc to make the same kind of content? Beyond that, most commercial art isn’t feasible to sell in those mediums. The people benefiting from this is so infinitesimally small compared to and not representative of the many commercial art markets at large— everything from concept artists to graphic designers to dancers— that it’s entirely forgivable to exclude it from analysis altogether, let alone basing your analysis on it. You might as well deem someone with a gunshot wound perfectly healthy based entirely on their hair.

The other direct-sell platforms you referenced have already been flooded by people bulk-creating AI knock-offs. The giant slop hose has already won the race to the bottom making it nearly impossible for people that aren’t already established to get started. It’s most obvious in stock photo markets, but in music, some of the creation tools specifically advertise generating output to avoid triggering copyright scanners.

And no, you can’t just go grab a job at the big studios because a) a lot of them are using, or assuming they’ll soon be able to effectively use, the same AI tools that everyone else is based in other peoples labor and eliminating FTEs, b) since so many commercial artists have been displaced by tech companies essentially selling their work, everybody— including former freelancers and indies— is shooting for the same dwindling set of jobs, and c) nobody in those industries is leaving their jobs because they know it might be the end of their career if they do.

I don’t expect you to understand the markets outside of your area of expertise, but I would appreciate your being less patronizing while you attempt to explain my career to me.

Why #1: not enough time and money.

The project had become a time sink, I get it. But that's exactly why OSS is a "What You See Is What You Get".

Normally I'd encourage any OSS maintainer in this position to just announce their intentions and let the community (as small as it might be) decide to either inherit maintenance and development of the project, or let it languish. I don't see any reason to close the repos so dramatically, depriving potential future readers of reaching the source code and improving upon it, as is the spirit of OSS.

The project had also become an actual cost, getting to the point of hiring contractors to make releases and please users (who would most probably have been unwilling to pay for that themselves, as my experience tells me most FOSS users are just freeloaders with no intention at all of supporting the project in any way or means). Well, what can I say, this conversation appears from time to time in HN. OSS maintainers need to have that special kind of ability to say "No" or even "I don't care" because otherwise the project (and its users) tend to absorb the author's attention, goodwill, wallet, and enthusiasm. It's very healthy, as a maintainer, to be able to ruthlessly point to the License file whenever someone complains and even _requires_ attention. The "Provided on an AS-IS BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND" phrase is wonderful.

I understand the author. The feeling of attachment and goodwill, the desire to show the highest attention to detail and quality support for a project is always there. We all experience it. But it's important to remember at all times that OSS is just an act of generosity to the universe, it cannot become a self-induced hell.

Why #2: legal concerns around potential litigations.

Yeah, I know it myself too: distributing FFmpeg binaries can be a legal risk if some codecs were enabled in the build.

Still no reason to shut everything down... or is it? My gut instinct for this is to "just" (I know, not a trivial change, but not astronomically complicated either) change to a "provide your own FFmpeg executable, please" model. Then, proceed with abandoning the project, as per the previous point.

Or just move everything to an anonymous Chinese Git provider.. and forget about receiving legal threats in there (just half-joking!)