Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).

That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.

That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.

Yaz

Look — I’m a developer. I get it. I’m personally all for having organizations do more to support the OSS they rely on. But the people in the C-suite are more worried about organizational reputation and losing money to lawsuits. If a piece of software they rely on has a known critical CVE that allows for remote code execution and someone breaks in and steals customer data — that software either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be scrapped. Those are the choices. Our customers in the EU are allowed to request SBOMs of everything we use and pass it through their own security validation software — and if they find sev critical CVEs in software we’re using there is going to be hell to pay. And the people in the C-suite can’t abide that level of risk.

Most software development companies (outside some of the biggest ones) don’t really have the kind of expertise in house to supply patches to something as complex as ffmpeg. But a company like Google has the staff with sufficient experience in this area that they could fork the project, fix the issues, and redistribute it as their own solution to the problem — and now Google is driving ffmpeg development. Organizations that need a security-guaranteed version will simply switch to Google’s version, which will likely slowly become incompatible with the original. They’ve done it before — Chrome was Google’s fork of WebKit, huge swaths of users flocked to Chrome, and now Google has over the years made enough changes that their patches often aren’t compatible with WebKit (and, of course, WebKit itself did similar when they forked KHTML).

Now forking like this is great for the community, but it can be tough on individual developers who see their work co-opted and then sidelined by massive corporations. And that’s really why the ffmpeg developers need to be very careful about ignoring CVEs like this. They do so at their own peril, as anyone can fork their code, fix the issues, and slowly make it incompatible with the original. And a big enough organization can ensure they’re fork becomes the new standard, leaving the original developers out in the cold.

Yaz

That, or your project gets sidelined. Which is where the danger lies.

I work for a big multinational software company that uses a lot of Open Source Software. We have a security office that audits all of our products several times a year. If any piece of our stack shows any open CVEs we have a fixed amount of time to fix the issue, with the amount of time varying from a few days (for CRITICAL severity issues) to roughly half a year for the lowest severity issues. A lack of a fix for a published CVE isn’t an excuse for not fixing the issue on our end — the software still has a security flaw in it, and the organization is so incredible security averse (thanks in part to having contacts in the defence industry) that they don’t want to risk expensive lawsuits and the loss of reputation if a vulnerability is exploited.

A lot of bigger organizations now work this way. We’ve all seen what has happened to organizations that have had significantly security breaches, and it’s not pretty. Our customers are big corporations and government entities — and if they even sniff a risk there are going to be problems. So if there is an unpatched exploit, we’re expected to either switch to something comparable, or DIY a solution (either replacing the library in question, or potentially patching it ourselves).

If ffmpeg allows known and published vulnerabilities to languish, the risk here is that organizations that use their code will simply stop using it and will look for other solutions. That’s a tough pill for an Open Source Software developer to swallow, especially when they make it as big and important as ffmpeg. You might wind up in a situation where an entity like Google forks your code and takes ownership, and eventually gets everyone to migrate to using their version instead (like what they did with WebKit to Chrome), leaving you sidelines. Or maybe someone else jumps in with a compatible solution that works well enough for enough users that they switch to that instead.

Now in an ideal world, the Google’s of this world would not only submit a CVE but would also submit a patch. Having been an OSS developer myself I’ve always encouraged my staff if they find a bug in a piece of software we use to file a bug report and ideally a patch if they know how to patch the issue correctly — but I know that is hardly universal within our organization, and probably even less so elsewhere.

TL;DR: a lot of OSS success relies on having lots of users, or at least some big and important users. But you risk losing those if you leave CVE’s open for too long, as company policies may require scrapping software with unfixed CVEs. That loss of users and reputation is dangerous for an OSS project — it’s how projects get supplanted, either by a fork or by a new (and similar) project.

Yaz

It may be a trite saying, but it's as true in education as it is in a gym. If you don't exercise your brain, it's not going to improve.

There's a reason weightlifters don't use a forklift or crane to pick up the barbells and do a dozen reps. The problem is not that the weights are in need of lifting. And that's the same problem with homework. The teacher doesn't need a stack of 5 page reports; what they need is for their students to practice using their brains.

Unfortunately the education system is designed to evaluate output instead of process. It's easier to grade a paper or a test, not evaluate a demonstration of knowledge. It's always been ripe for cheating, but now the cheat tools are everywhere and made legitimate by techbros demanding AI productivity. So either teaching will change, or we'll head straight for idiocracy and nobody will be left with the skills to wonder why it all went to hell.

Just relabel bookmarks as tabs and there you go.

Its already treating them as bookmarks though.. I just wish mozilla would fix smaller things like giving a site storage size limit that actually worked and didn't just ignore it and also wouldn't churn disk as much for no reason at all.

that would 100% be a firing offence.

Honestly, setting an AI you don’t control lose on your production database? Really? That’s just gross incompetence. This is code that a) wasn’t written or reviewed by a human, and b) code that wasn’t even tested on a development copy of the database.

Developers that do things like that are a liability. Unfortunately as “founder” he’ll likely just post something on LinkedIn about learning from his mistakes and “personal growth”, and that will be the end of it. Anyone else would have been shown the door to accelerate their “personal growth”.

Yaz

Dreaming of getting 30% of photoshop sales prices instead of 20 bucks for the os messed up a lot of their strategy. Of course it was unrealistic from the start but led to win8 and winrt and everything after that.

Well, basically yes, thsts where its going.

He can't let anyone use it for gov stuff anyway or cia gets to read whats on there.

But look euro countries are thinking of moving governance out of MS now too due to trump crossing the line publicly of ordering ms around.

Was anyone buying ipods in the latter years when they were just idevices without the phone and they just started making the smaller version of ipad anyway then.

Yes inherently its just running on the customers computer anyway, so they don't actually have control.

Not sending other players locations when not necessary etc would be cooler.

And you can cheat by off-device means anyway, you can do an aimbot that doesn't run any code on the computer now.

Wow came out like a decade after my bank at the time had 2fa.

Sure at first it was over telnet and phone lines so it wasn't terribly secure at first..

To teach you don't need massive amounts of content, lessons don't need to be superfacially unique at all, they're scalable on their own.

The need to make new books for schools etc every year is based just on the need to sell them too, basics of languages do not change every year, a student doesn't benefit from unlimited amounts of basic class learning material.

Thats not entirely true. To update an old ios app to be uploadable into the store is significant amount of work due to apple themselves deprecating stuff and requiring you use a newer xcode. You can't just "update the api call" and expect it to be publishable.

You can only download, put it on the device and read it as long as they decide that they and by extension you have the right to read the book.

You're just renting an access to the book with the drm. Under terms that aren't clear to you since you don't know these dates and contracts that they have with the creator and publisher.

"The area that Google did well in that would not have happened had I not been distracted is Android, where it was a natural thing for me. I was trying, although what I didn't do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone. That was ours for the taking."

The antitrust case was overturned by the Appellate Court in 2001. The DOJ and Microsoft settled the outstanding portions in November 2001.

Android Inc. was started in 2003, and was four guys using pre-existing Open Source components to build an OS for mobile phones. Google bought them in 2005, and the first handset using Android was released in 2008.

Bill, you had seven years and the entire backing of a massive corporation (including all of its employees and intellectual property) after the antitrust case was settled, and couldn’t pull off what four guys started and Google finished in five using Open Source components.

Yaz