Not robotics, really - where did u get that from? But I tend to call a spade a spade. Most of my customers seem to like my straightforwardness and lack of bs. My company isn’t so conventional - more like a group of engineers I’ve put together that make cool stuff and sometimes sell it to keep the place in business. It always amazes me how the revenue keeps flowing considering how little effort we put into the marketing side of things.

Don’t worry, I’m sure you couldn’t afford our products. And I bet engineers at my company have contributed over 10x what you’ll ever contribute to useful open source libraries! But we can’t all live in mom and dad’s basement pretending we know what we’re talking about, can we?

Not inconvenient, but impossible really. I get that most people don’t really understand embedded systems, but it’s a shame when innovation is blocked because of it.

There’s a time and place, no? You buy a $30k video switcher with support, do you really want to fuck with the internals or just get the company to add/fix features you need. It’s impossible for the company to support you once you’ve fucked with the thing.
I understand open source - we use it and we contribute. But that doesn’t mean we can open source all our code. We have competitors who would abuse that. If no one can make a living selling code, then there will be no one to support open source.

I don’t need sympathy. I just warn others to steer clear of ffmpeg.

The problem isn’t giving access to users, hell it’s just Linux on an sd card that they can fuck with all they like. But it’s supporting that. Getting all the stuff to work together requires a nightmare of version specifications and some ugly hacks. We can’t support that and our customers wouldn’t want it. By your description, using Linux in any embedded solution isn’t allowed.

I contribute to open source plenty. My company hardly makes any profit. We put it all back into r&d because we like making stuff. Employing engineers then allows them to also contribute to open source. But we have to sell stuff to keep things going. And if we made improvement to the ffmpeg source, we’d definitely publish it. But we didn’t. We just used it in an embedded solution which had a bunch of custom apps gluing it all together. We did what many others have done, but ffmpeg decided to try to shake us down (they literally asked for a payout to make it go away). Corporate litigation is stupidly expensive and not what we want to spend our time on. I don’t really care. We had fun making the device and learned a bunch. We just also learned to avoid ffmpeg like the plague.

We switched to dynamic libraries, but they still wouldn’t let it go. It seemed a distinction without a difference, but we did it as we thought it would put us in the clear. And yes it should have, but little of this has actually been tested in court. So smaller companies can’t risk the huge legal cost, even if they know they’re in the right. So ffmpeg killed the project for no good reason - like I said: they’re assholes. And I don’t think forking it would have made any difference, the fork is still covered by the same license. The project was still just a prototype , but with ffmpeg’s harassment we dropped it and used something else for subsequent projects. When we actually touch open source code usefully, we always share it even if we never make a product that uses it.

Well calling them assholes is kinda personal, no?

It was an embedded system. The user wouldn’t be able to download and install stuff, they just turn the thing on. The ffmpeg libraries were provided as is as separate files in the system.
If that’s their policy, ok. But it means we can’t use it in embedded systems.

If a company has to release their whole product as open source, they likely can’t make back their investment on development.
This particular case may be cut and dry, but I’ve had ffmpeg come after my company just for having an embedded Linux solution that uses off-the-shelf ffmpeg libraries. They claimed we had to release all of our custom libraries and app source and environment that were in the same product even though they didn’t have a line of ffmpeg code in them. As a small company, we couldn’t afford the litigation, so we just dropped the project.

I have personal experience. I don’t need to Google it, thanks.

In this case, sure, idk. I’ve had a project shut down because ffmpeg threatened law suits unless we open sourced our own custom libraries that work along side ffmpeg. And it’s not just the source code, they want full build environments. Our lawyers wouldn’t touch it, so we just shut it all down. Now I use gstreamer and avoid ffmpeg like the plague.

Ffmpeg are kinda assholes and squelch innovation tbh.