The real reason. Greedy bastards, and the risk of your business being set on fire by greedy bastards, even if they don't have a right to anything - they can still threaten to waste your time and money and offer a shakedown instead.
I've never used FFmpegKit (I've mostly just used the command-line, or indirectly via yt-dlp and Handbrake) but just hearing about it now, the maintainer sounds like an awesome person who really went above and beyond to support free software, so hooray for them! I bet it was useful for thousands of other projects, and those people are all grateful too.
They're not obligated to respond, and they enjoy the fear, uncertainty and doubt their non-response creates.
It doesn’t make them evil…just bureaucratic.
The process for reporting to them for sales is also horrible. Uploading excel spreadsheets to an ASP.NET backend that's barely holding together. It's minimal effort from them to leverage all possible legal action over you. Horrible.
And "we paid for something and want ROI" are not damages. There's no legal right to profit from an investment. You gotta use it or lose it.
Patent owners don't even have the right to make the invention themselves (because it may infringe on other patents).
So your problem is fairly foundational.
Normally you can't win a lawsuit without proving damages. My overarching point is that buying IP with no intent to use it does not create damages when someone infringes it. And relicensing IP is not "using" the IP to me - you either use it, or lose it. Unless of course, you're the original author (and by author, I mean the humans, not businesses that paid them)
The point of IP laws is to protect creators and encourage development. When the resulting markets do the opposite you have to ask if the design of those laws is flawed, and I really believe that.
The patent "business" is just garbage. A company full of lawyers collecting rents on mathematical algorithms does not "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I think there is still a place for patents, but most of the time they seem to just stifle innovation and increase the cost of everything.
Steam, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, BandCamp, commissions... The creator economy is booming and is on the rise. I've seen some metrics say it's got a 40% CAGR.
MrBeast, PsychicPebbles, VivziePop, Joel Haver - all made brands for themselves. The currency is personal brand. Most of the creators I follow these days are indies, not big studios.
But even excepting that, you can always work for a big studio if you're not interested in the additional headache of working for yourself and building a personal brand. Gaming, film, and music are huge and there are companies hiring in these spaces.
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.
It's enormously disingenuous to compare the rise of hucksters like this to artists or creative professionals.
Further - gaming has just seen the greatest layoffs in history, as all the major studios and publishers attempt to reduce costs and leverage 'AI', since the games as a service model is winner takes all. Independent film is all but dead since the franchise film has taken the box office. And music, are you kidding? Spotify has so cucked musicians that it's actively replacing them with AI generated mush, trained on their work, and the economic disparity is so great there's nothing they can do about it - https://www.fastcompany.com/91170296/spotify-ai-music
Ah there's the magic word! You shouldn't have to be a "brand"... the people you listed are not who I would call "independent".
Capitalism is the root of evil to all this. Sorry.
So they go after ffmpeg's US-based users/customers instead.
France is also a party to the European Patent Convention, which specifically states that programs for computers are not patentable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...
Software patents are mainly a US-only thing.
Any software you write, or even run, may or may not infringe some half-assed patent, and you will never know until the troll wielding it and deliberately trying to keep it hidden, pounces on you, usually demanding money, threatening to use their government-backed exclusive rights to their "invention" so you either pay what they ask, do what they ask, or they sue you for infringement and sometimes win. Larger companies have large troves of patents and they really don't care what's in them, they care that they have lots and you don't, and they can use them to crush you in court unless you give in to whatever they demand.
Some companies you know of may already have given in, and may already be paying licensing fees to patent holders. It sickens me.
I'm not suggesting, I'm telling you there is an entity, formerly MPEG-LA, now Via Licensing Corp, who maintain a pool of patents that supposedly claim exclusive rights to aspects of some of the video codecs implemented in FFMPEG.
If they hear you're making money, and you use video codecs -- ffmpeg's implementation or otherwise -- they may come to shake you down. They get to pick and choose who they accuse of patent infringement. They can do it at any time (before the expiry of the last patent in the pool). They can do it at the point where they'll have maximum leverage over you. Software patents give them that opportunity.
Should they get in touch with you, your response should be made in consultation with qualified lawyers.
> Q: Bottom line: Should I be worried about patent issues if I use FFmpeg?
> A: Are you a private user working with FFmpeg for your own personal purposes? If so, there is remarkably little reason to be concerned. Are you using FFmpeg in a commercial software product? Read on to the next question...
> Q: Is it perfectly alright to incorporate the whole FFmpeg core into my own commercial product?
> A: You might have a problem here. There have been cases where companies have used FFmpeg in their products. These companies found out that once you start trying to make money from patented technologies, the owners of the patents will come after their licensing fees. Notably, MPEG LA is vigilant and diligent about collecting for MPEG-related technologies.
Thanks to Taner Sener for putting in all the effort! I guess most technical people shudder at the mere thought of dealing with all the legal matters.
Open source is beautiful and broken at the same time.
If you do it because you want it for your stuff, cool.
If you do it because you feel obliged to appease "the community" who takes for granted that you support them, that's a symptom of the broken model that is open source.
Has echos of the Linux for Apple Silicon guy last week who used to be a Wii modder, tired of the support tickets from entitled pirates, moved to a niche Linux distro, and discovered a similar sense of entitlement in the issue tracker.
I really hope the "significant sum" he paid was out of donations to the project, and not his own money. Even then, it sounds like he's poured a ton of his time and energy into the project over the years, so even if it was all donated money, he certainly could have kept it for himself without any moral/ethical concerns.
If we care about outcomes, the only thing to do is get the law changed so companies like that can't exist. Not because they are banned, but because there's no business model there.
If that’s the case, software engineers relying on it should learn how to build FFmpeg from source and handle platform-specific challenges (especially on Android). The loss of the overall community support doesn’t seem that significant, right?
That said, whether someone uses FFmpeg-kit or builds FFmpeg manually, the legal risks remain the same. If they don’t understand codec patents (like x264 and MPEG-LA) or GPL/LGPL obligations, they could face lawsuits or be forced to release their code under GPL. The real issue isn’t FFmpeg-kit—it’s whether developers actually understand these legal implications.
Jk, thank you for your work!
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!)
Farewell FFmpegKit. You will be missed.
