RE: https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/115534391605162502
🤔 I'm interested to see where this lands. It's comical how little some of these companies give back to these projects, despite having multi-billion dollar businesses use these tools and languages.
@webology In this case I find it very weird to complain about bug reports. If someone finds a bug in your software and reports it to you they are doing you a service. That *is* giving back.
@webology A bug report is a contribution. If I tell you that you have something in your teeth I'm doing you a service and I would be rather put out if you followed up with a demand that I pay for some dental hygiene products, even if I were very rich.
@webology Whether and how much Google uses or supports FFMpeg is unrelated to them opening bug reports.
I am a big fan of corporations supporting the projects they use but this is good citizenship in my book, not entitlement or demanding behavior.
@pganssle Using it is different from asking the maintainers to do all the work for free. The license allows anyone to use it, but the maintainers have right to push back on any company they feel is abusing their good will. Good citizenship isn't knocking on my door every time trash blows into my yard to let me know so I can pick it up because it benefits your business. I think too many people conflate goodwill and makes excuses instead of doing right by the people doing the work.
@pganssle Dunno. I'm not reading into it that Googler's are forcing them into anything, but I can see how it can be overwhelming for them especially when they see a Trillion-dollar company vs. the faces of contributors fixing the bugs they are raising issues for. It's not like Google doesn't have the resources or capital. Feels like a lot of entitlement to me, whether Alphabet/Google intends on it or not.