Am 27.10.23 um 03:28 schrieb Kieran Kunhya:
Hi,
On Thu, 26 Oct 2023 at 12:41, Thilo Borgmann via ffmpeg-devel <
ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org> wrote:
Of course. FFmpeg has a donations account. So the money is already there
and
already used for the reimbursement requests. Whatever we spent it for
needs to
be decided by the community. Spending more money instead of just watch it
growing is a good thing. That this will lead to more "disaster" is an
assumption
without basis. Even if this does happen and fails, its still better than
not
having even tried.
Reimbursement requests for clearly defined things like travel costs with
receipts, or hardware that the project owns is in no way comparable to
consulting work, contracts, statements of work etc. And the current swscale
proposal is far from this too.
Yes, of course they are different. Most importantly sponsored development needs
to be agreed upon beforehand. That does not imply sponsored work is not clearly
defined. I miss your argument about why it can't be done in this.
Also, you just advertised FFmpeg and asked for more financial support in
your
talk at Demuxed [1] - so I figure your prefered way of doing that would be
to
channel money into some company without the community being involved?
Actually if you watched the presentation, I said big companies need to
support maintenance (not the same as bounties) of FFmpeg by hiring
employees to work full time as they do with Linux Kernel maintainers. Or
failing that they can donate to the community - but as you know well the
numbers we have are not enough to hire full time maintainers.
I'm totally fine with you asking big companies to hire devs for FFmpeg
maintenance. That does not relate to my question, though. Do I assume correctly
that your prefered way of doing that would be to channel money into some company
without the community being involved?
Agreement via mailing list for money is a recipe for disaster. What we need
are clear statements of work that are voted on by TC.
That's not the purpose of the TC. We of course need to have a good way of
approving or disapproving proposals and of course we need these to be clearly
defined. I again miss to see your argument why that shall not be possible on the
ML - everyone on this list knows where your suspicion comes from but again,
without even having tried, it's just your assumption and should IMHO not
stopping us from trying to implement such a procedure.
We can't even agree on patch reviews, throwing money into the mix is
throwing gasoline into the fire.
Being in conflict about a patch is completely different to conflict about some
feature we might want. And no, not everything is as controversial as SDR or gets
controversial just because it would be sponsored. You think there would have
been real and non-resolvable opposition against bringing multi-threading into
ffmpeg.c? You assume a proposed sponsored AV2 decoder will raise such opposition?
However, since I agree with you that there will be different oppinions, why
would you think that a e.g. a vote/committee or whatever we will choose could
not resolve how we deal with these cases?
And since you also advertised explicitly for FFlabs - what is your relation
to
FFlabs? I own 25% of that company and I am not aware of any relationship.
You
just did advertise FFlabs because... FFlabs exists? FFlabs is a company
co-owned
by some FFmpeg developers, it's not FFmpeg nor can it represent it or act
on its
behalf.
I linked to the consulting page and also to FFlabs which as far as I know
is the only company offering an SLA on FFmpeg.
If others existed I would have included them.
Nothing wrong about bringing attention to ff.org/consulting or FFlabs.
My question is what your relationship with FFlabs is?
As soon as we pay developers via SPI it can become a good zero-trust
environment
for donators to offer tasks & money to FFmpeg and handle the money flow
via SPI.
The donators can be sure that their issues are handled properly in the
project
(on the ML) and do not flow away into some other sink and the developers
can be
sure to get their money from SPI because the offer is public and backed by
the
FFmpeg SPI account. Sounds like a quite trustworthy and most importantyl
transparent way to handle things and build up trust in potential donators
that
the money they spent actually end up with FFmpeg.
Do you really think the way SPI funding is managed currently matches your
description?
That's exactly the point, to find a procedure that works for sponsored work.
Stefano approves by saying "Approved on my side, pending Michael's
approval."
That won't change because SPI demands it. Done. We can change the names Stefano
and Michael into whatever, but that's it.
> This is not at all a community driven process where one person can veto
> everything.
What needs to be setup, is a procedure to find FFmpeg's decision about it.
Who transports it to and approves it towards SPI is completely uninmportant
because it cannot be done against the will of FFmpeg - and yes, SPI checks.
Also blocking by a single individual cannot be done already, doesn't even matter
if it's Michael or Stefano.
I don't think developers should be paid via SPI for this reason.
I think supporting FFmpeg developers via SPI fits perfectly into what we
have
SPI for in the first place - an independant entity that handles the
community
funds with absolute objectivity and no intrinsic interest whatsoever. In
contrast to any company, including (my own-ish) FFlabs.
If there is disagreement (which will be inevitable) SPI will not step in.
Only if non-resolvable. If we setup a procedure, that is solved.
Money is only going to make our current ML drama situation worse.
Circling again. I think everyone long enough on this list agrees with you that
we have drama potential on almost everything here. However, CC & TC
instanciation proved that we have a way of putting an end to the drama.
So why don't you want to give it a try at least?
-Thilo
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