The real reason. Greedy bastards, and the risk of your business being set on fire by greedy bastards, even if they don't have a right to anything - they can still threaten to waste your time and money and offer a shakedown instead.
I've never used FFmpegKit (I've mostly just used the command-line, or indirectly via yt-dlp and Handbrake) but just hearing about it now, the maintainer sounds like an awesome person who really went above and beyond to support free software, so hooray for them! I bet it was useful for thousands of other projects, and those people are all grateful too.
They're not obligated to respond, and they enjoy the fear, uncertainty and doubt their non-response creates.
The process for reporting to them for sales is also horrible. Uploading excel spreadsheets to an ASP.NET backend that's barely holding together. It's minimal effort from them to leverage all possible legal action over you. Horrible.
And "we paid for something and want ROI" are not damages. There's no legal right to profit from an investment. You gotta use it or lose it.
Patent owners don't even have the right to make the invention themselves (because it may infringe on other patents).
So your problem is fairly foundational.
Steam, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, BandCamp, commissions... The creator economy is booming and is on the rise. I've seen some metrics say it's got a 40% CAGR.
MrBeast, PsychicPebbles, VivziePop, Joel Haver - all made brands for themselves. The currency is personal brand. Most of the creators I follow these days are indies, not big studios.
But even excepting that, you can always work for a big studio if you're not interested in the additional headache of working for yourself and building a personal brand. Gaming, film, and music are huge and there are companies hiring in these spaces.
So they go after ffmpeg's US-based users/customers instead.
Thanks to Taner Sener for putting in all the effort! I guess most technical people shudder at the mere thought of dealing with all the legal matters.
Open source is beautiful and broken at the same time.
If you do it because you want it for your stuff, cool.
If you do it because you feel obliged to appease "the community" who takes for granted that you support them, that's a symptom of the broken model that is open source.
Has echos of the Linux for Apple Silicon guy last week who used to be a Wii modder, tired of the support tickets from entitled pirates, moved to a niche Linux distro, and discovered a similar sense of entitlement in the issue tracker.
I really hope the "significant sum" he paid was out of donations to the project, and not his own money. Even then, it sounds like he's poured a ton of his time and energy into the project over the years, so even if it was all donated money, he certainly could have kept it for himself without any moral/ethical concerns.
If that’s the case, software engineers relying on it should learn how to build FFmpeg from source and handle platform-specific challenges (especially on Android). The loss of the overall community support doesn’t seem that significant, right?
That said, whether someone uses FFmpeg-kit or builds FFmpeg manually, the legal risks remain the same. If they don’t understand codec patents (like x264 and MPEG-LA) or GPL/LGPL obligations, they could face lawsuits or be forced to release their code under GPL. The real issue isn’t FFmpeg-kit—it’s whether developers actually understand these legal implications.
Jk, thank you for your work!
The project had become a time sink, I get it. But that's exactly why OSS is a "What You See Is What You Get".
Normally I'd encourage any OSS maintainer in this position to just announce their intentions and let the community (as small as it might be) decide to either inherit maintenance and development of the project, or let it languish. I don't see any reason to close the repos so dramatically, depriving potential future readers of reaching the source code and improving upon it, as is the spirit of OSS.
The project had also become an actual cost, getting to the point of hiring contractors to make releases and please users (who would most probably have been unwilling to pay for that themselves, as my experience tells me most FOSS users are just freeloaders with no intention at all of supporting the project in any way or means). Well, what can I say, this conversation appears from time to time in HN. OSS maintainers need to have that special kind of ability to say "No" or even "I don't care" because otherwise the project (and its users) tend to absorb the author's attention, goodwill, wallet, and enthusiasm. It's very healthy, as a maintainer, to be able to ruthlessly point to the License file whenever someone complains and even _requires_ attention. The "Provided on an AS-IS BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND" phrase is wonderful.
I understand the author. The feeling of attachment and goodwill, the desire to show the highest attention to detail and quality support for a project is always there. We all experience it. But it's important to remember at all times that OSS is just an act of generosity to the universe, it cannot become a self-induced hell.
Why #2: legal concerns around potential litigations.
Yeah, I know it myself too: distributing FFmpeg binaries can be a legal risk if some codecs were enabled in the build.
Still no reason to shut everything down... or is it? My gut instinct for this is to "just" (I know, not a trivial change, but not astronomically complicated either) change to a "provide your own FFmpeg executable, please" model. Then, proceed with abandoning the project, as per the previous point.
Or just move everything to an anonymous Chinese Git provider.. and forget about receiving legal threats in there (just half-joking!)
Farewell FFmpegKit. You will be missed.
