[FFmpeg-devel] GSoC 2017 mentor summit review

[Thilo Borgmann]

Hi,

Carl Eugen and me went to the mentor summit this year. We've met a lot of known
and some yet unknown users and had a lot of interesting talks with them, as well
as a lot conversations with representatives of other projects about OSS
development in general and GSoC matters in particular.

We had an audio & video developer meetup session with people from VideoLan, Kodi,
Mixxx, MuseScore (IIRC). It was not very technical, mostly a general discussion about
how development and cooperation could work. 

There was also a very interesting session about different licenses used in OSS
given by a Google open-source lawyer that really added to what I had known about this topic.
I still try to get a copy of these slides, however a very good resource was referenced [1].

Two guys of the Apertus project [2] presented a prototype of their open-source cinematic camera, completely build by open hardware - well except for some still closed optional modules like a flash drive.
Their camera looks quite impressive and they looking into integrating FFmpeg in their camera.
We are still missing handling of their 48bit Bayer patterns, though. Any volunteers?

Kostya Serebryany talked about Google's OSS-Fuzz project we already benefit a
lot from. For everyone not aware, FFmpeg is leading the charts of having
revealed more than 2000 issues during their 24/7 fuzzing. A little
live demo of their fuzzer was about identifying the well-known heartbleed
vulnerability within seconds in an older SSH implementation. This has actually become
part of their fuzzer's regression tests.
He took time to explain why timeouts and OOM are important,
not only because they may hide other issues and make the
fuzzer's work more difficult.
He additionally commented on why fixing undefined behaviour
is important (can trigger compiler non-bugs and leads to different
behaviour on different hardware) and mentioned current sparc
hardware that allows fast address sanitation (may be too
expensive for a project like FFmpeg...)

Next to that I had a chat with Stephanie Taylor and gave some feedback about the
issues we had this year during student selection (like I promised to do in a
mail from this point in time). Good news that should have a positive effect for
us being able to better judge a student's actual interest in the project they
are applying at, is that Google will have the number of applications a student
can submit way more limited than before - the maximum number of applications
will be set to three. (Google already states this in their FAQ today).

Although I could not attend that particular session in person, there have been taken
detailed notes during it about how to keep GSoC students sticking with their
project after the program ends [3]. I find some things in it quite interesting.

So let's prepare for GSoC 2018! :)

-Thilo

p.s. I don't know if the guys caring about our social media representations already wrote something. I'd appreciate if you would also write some lines about that. Thanks!


[1] https://opensource.org/licenses/

[2] https://www.apertus.org/

[3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/191ItHQfO92MxoS-IQ2dmlEQ3TcPqXGkFgzdyFXEFy_c/edit#heading=h.srrvw9px1v5x