[FFmpeg-devel] Sovereign Tech Fund

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hello Kieran

On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 03:02:24PM +0000, Kieran Kunhya wrote:
> >
> >
> > >> [...] the GA definitly cannot object to an invoice for a project that
> > the GA approved previously.
> > > "The General Assembly is sovereign and legitimate for all its decisions
> > regarding the FFmpeg project."
> >
> > When working with a contract (and a SOW), the General Assembly won't be
> > able to block an invoice.
> > Because the General Assembly will already have exercised its sovereignty
> > before the work started.
> > And unless the GA becomes a nation, any court of law would uphold the
> > contract.
> >
> 
> In this project, acceptance of a patch is based on the technical contents
> of a patch, not a few vague paragraphs in a SoW. These decisions are made
> by the Technical Committee and the General Assembly.
> 

> Tying the project contractually is unacceptable.

"the FFmpeg project" is not a legal entity, so thats probably not even possible if one
wanted.

Also FFmpeg has been part of Google summer of code for many many years
and also in the past in outreachy. All these projects payed "students"
for work they did.
From a legal point of view, these are probably very similar

Mysteriously, there was a total absence of similar drama there.
I wonder how it could have been possible to do that for over a decade
with not one instance of drama or problems like here.

We had students passing the mentors review, being paid but code was
found not be clean enough yet for git master and was not yet merged
I remember no fight about any such case.
There also where the normal cases where students failed to reach the
goal and did not get paid abd code was not merged, and the ones that
succeeded got paid and code was merged.


> There are plenty of "corporate" open source projects where this is fine,
> but there is a reason we are not one of those full of corporate friendly
> code like binary blobs, intrinsics, SDKs etc.

Iam glad there is one thing we agree on :)

thx

[...]

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

Dictatorship: All citizens are under surveillance, all their steps and
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