[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] financial sustainability Plan A (SPI)

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 11:45 AM Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc>
wrote:

> This is financial sustainability Plan A (SPI)
> ATM SPI has like 150k $, we do not activly seek donations, we do not
> currently
> use SPI money to fund any development. SPI money is ultimately controlled
> by
> the FFmpeg community and everything is transparent and public.
>
> 1. We should fund some FFmpeg development with SPI-FFmpeg money
> 2. We should activly seek more donations for SPI-FFmpeg
>
> To help 2. we should favor flashy, cool development that can bring in more
> donations
>

Hm... There's a lot going in the above. I'd like to dissect. With 2, are
you looking for end user donations, or corporate contributions? Without
trying to be too picky, I believe they are different. Users like flashy new
features. My impression from discussions is that corporations are asking
for a lot of things, but flashy new features aren't the ones I've heard
them ask for.

With his Demuxed lightning talk, Kieran was aiming for corporate
contributions, not end user donations. I'd like to play advocate for the
devil for a second. Why would they do that? What might their desired
outcomes be?
- a more stable, polite, professional community (community sustainability)
- continued codebase maintenance, support, bugfixing (codebase
sustainability)
- so that devs who write features important to them might stay around and
maintain said features and possibly even become friendly mentors /
reviewers for future contributors - maybe even develop more features
(developer sustainability)

I also think they'd like safeguards in place. If they are willing to set
aside non-trivial amounts of *their* (not ours) money that can pay for the
annual lifelihood of a fulltime developer ("salary"), then this can no
longer be carried with community votes of an often hostile community. I
agree with Michael's point earlier that 501c3 donations are tax-deductible
for US-based corporations, which might be helpful. Maybe that can be done
with EU-based non-profits also (not an expert there). More importantly,
though, is that I doubt they would just "give" the money and sit on the
sidelines. They'd ask for a seat at the table in return - it is *their*
money, after all. In US non-profits, this is called an advisory board.
Also, these non-profits are usually run by an executive director which has
the support of that board & community. This guarantees some professional
accountability, e.g. to ensure the donations are used for useful purposes
in a somewhat-professional/accountable fashion (not just parties).

Some of this probably sounds scary to some of you. But the idea that they'd
just throw us some money and see what happens is equally scary to them. Our
community's track record (professionalism, politeness, self-sustainability)
is not good enough for that.

Ronald