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Comment by joshkel | Hacker News Reader

In a follow-up tweet, Mark Atwood eloborates: "Amazon was very carefully complying with the licenses on FFmpeg. One of my jobs there was to make sure the company was doing so. Continuing to make sure the company was was often the reason I was having a meeting like that inside the company."

I interpret this as meaning there was an implied "if you screw this up" at the end of "they could kill three major product lines with an email."

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Are you interpreting that as "if we violate the license, they can revoke our right to use the software" ?? And they use it in 3 products so that would be really bad. That would make sense to have a compliance person.

Possibly Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, and another one that escapes my mind (AWS-related?).

AWS for sure (Elemental maybe?), but could also be Ring.

Yeah - Amazon Elastic Transcoder which they just shut down and replaced with Elemental MediaConvert is almost certainly just managed "ffmpeg as a Service" under the hood.

And Blink. I used to contract with them a few years back, they all rely heavily on open source.

Twitch definitely. This whole brouhaha has been brewing for a while, and can be traced back to a spat between Theo and ffmpeg.

In the now deleted tweet Theo thrashed VLC codecs to which ffmpeg replied basically "send patches, but you wouldn't be able to". The reply to which was

--- start quote ---

https://x.com/theo/status/1952441894023389357

You clearly have no idea how much of my history was in ffmpeg. I built a ton of early twitch infra on top of yall.

--- end quote ---

This culminated in Theo offering a 20k bounty to ffmpeg if they remove the people running ffmpeg twitter account. Which prompted a lot of heated discussion.

So when Google Project Zero posted their bug... ffmpeg went understandably ballistic

Still doesn't make any sense.

The company that I work at makes sure anything that uses third-party library, whether in internal tools/shipped product/hosted product, goes through legal review. And you'd better comply with whatever the legal team asks you to do. Unless you and everyone around you are as dumb as a potato, you are not going to do things that blatantly violates licenses, like shipping a binary with modified but undisclosed GPL source code. And you can be sure that (1) it's hard to use anything GPL or LGPL in the first place (2) even if you are allowed to, someone will tell you to be extra careful and exactly do what you are told to (or not to)

And as long as Amazon is complying with ffmpeg's LGPL license, ffmpeg can't just stop licensing existing code via an email. Of course, unless there is some secret deal, but again, in that case, someone in the giant corporation will make sure you follow what's in the contract.

Basically, at company at Amazon where there are functional legal teams, the chance of someone "screwing up" is very small.

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