Thus, as Mark Atwood, an open source policy expert, pointed out on Twitter, he had to keep telling Amazon to not do things that would mess up FFmpeg because, he had to keep explaining to his bosses that “They are not a vendor, there is no NDA, we have no leverage, your VP has refused to help fund them, and they could kill three major product lines tomorrow with an email. So, stop, and listen to me … ”
I agree with the headline here. If Google can pay someone to find bugs, they can pay someone to fix them. How many time have managers said "Don't come to me with problems, come with solutions"
I've been a proponent of upstreaming fixes for open source software.
Why?
- It makes continued downstream consumption easier, you don't have to rely on fragile secret patches.
- It gives back to projects that helped you to begin with, it's a simple form of paying it forward.
- It all around seems like the "ethical" and "correct" thing to do.
Unfortunately, in my experience, there's often a lot of barriers within companies to upstream. Reasons can be everything from compliance, processes, you name it... It's unfortunate.
I have a very distinct recollection of talks about hardware aspirations and upstreaming software fixes at a large company. The cultural response was jarring.
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."
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.
Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in other open source projects.
They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork.
It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.
There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.
That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either.
In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.
A fork is more expensive to maintain than funding/contributing to the original project. You have to duplicate all future work yourselves, third party code starts expecting their version instead of your version, etc.
Yes, definitely. I was just saying that if the license ever did change, they would move to an in-house library. In fact, they would probably release the library for consumer use as an AWS product.
I'd guess Prime Video heavily relies on ffmpeg, then you got Elastic Transcode and the Elemental Video Services. Probably Cloudfront also has special things for streaming that rely on ffmpeg.
The "kill it with an email" probably means that whoever said this is afraid that some usecase there wouldn't stand up to an audit by the usual patent troll mothercluckers. The patents surrounding video are so complex, old and plentiful that I'd assume full compliance is outright impossible.
AWS MediaConvert as well which is a huge API (in surface it covers) which is under Elemental but is kinda it's own thing - willing to bet (though I don't know) that that is ffmpeg somewhere underneath.
The API manual for it is nearly 4000 pages and it can do insane stuff[1].
I had to use it at last job(TM), it's not terrible API wise.
> "Don't come to me with problems, come with solutions"
The problem is, the issue in the article is explicitly named as "CVE slop", so if the patch is of the same quality, it might require quite some work anyway.
The linked report seems to me to be the furthest thing from "slop". It is an S-tier bug report that includes a complete narrative, crash artifacts, and detailed repro instructions. I can't believe anyone is complaining about what is tied for the best bug report I have ever seen. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/440183164?pli=1
But it's also a bug report about the decoder for "SANM ANIM v0" - a format so obscure almost all the search results are the bug report itself. Possibly a format exclusive to mid-1990s LucasArts games [1]
Pretty crazy that ffmpeg supports the codec in the first place, IMHO.
I can understand volunteers not wanting to sink time into maintaining a codec to play a video format that hasn't been used since the Clinton administration. gstreamer divides their plugins into 'good', 'bad' and 'ugly' to give them somewhere to stash unmaintained codecs.
It's a codec that is enabled by default at least on major Linux distributions, and that will be processed by ffmpeg without any extra flags. Anyone playing an untrusted video file without explictly overriding the codec autodetection is vulnerable.
The format being obscure and having no real usage doesn't help when it's the attackers creating the files. The obscure formats are exposing just as much attack surface as the common ones.
> Pretty crazy that ffmpeg supports the codec in the first place, IMHO.
Yeah but as you can see from the bug report ffmpeg automatically triggers the codec based on file magic, so it is possible that if you run some kind of network service or anything that handles hostile data an attacker could trigger the bug.
I’m an open source maintainer, so I empathize with the sentiment that large companies appear to produce labor for unpaid maintainers by disclosing security issues. But appearance is operative: a security issue is something that I (as the maintainer) would need to fix regardless of who reports it, or would otherwise need to accept the reputational hit that comes with not triaging security reports. That’s sometimes perfectly fine (it’s okay for projects to decide that security isn’t a priority!), but you can’t have it both ways.
If google bears no role in fixing the issues it finds and nobody else is being paid to do it either, it functionally is just providing free security vulnerability research for malicious actors because almost nobody can take over or switch off of ffmpeg.
I don’t think vulnerability researchers are having trouble finding exploitable bugs in FFmpeg, so I don’t know how much this actually holds. Much of the cost center of vulnerability research is weaponization and making an exploit reliable against a specific set of targets.
(The argument also seems backwards to me: Google appears to use a lot of not-inexpensive human talent to produce high quality reports to projects, instead of dumping an ASan log and calling it a day. If all they cared about was shoveling labor onto OSS maintainers, they could make things a lot easier for themselves than they currently do!)
Yeah it's more effort, but I'd argue that security through obscurity is a super naive approach. I'm not on Google's side here, but so much infrastructure is "secured" by gatekeeping knowledge.
I don't think you should try to invoke the idea of naivete when you fail to address the unhappy but perfectly simple reality that the ideal option doesn't exist, is a fantasy that isn't actually available, and among the available options, even though none are good, one is worse than another.
"obscurity isn't security" is true enough, as far as it goes, but is just not that far.
And "put the bugs that won't be fixed soon on a bill board" is worse.
The super naive approach is ignoring that and thinking that "fix the bugs" is a thing that exists.
I guess the question that a person at Google who discovers a bug they don’t personally have time to fix is, should they report the bug at all? They don’t necessarily know if someone else will be able to pick it up. So the current “always report” rule makes sense since you don’t have to figure out if someone can fix it.
The same question applies if they have time to fix it in six months, since that presumably still gives attackers a large window of time.
In this case the bug was so obscure it’s kind of silly.
My takeaway from the article was not that the report was a problem, but a change in approach from Google that they’d disclose publicly after X days, regardless of if the project had a chance to fix it.
To me its okay to “demand” from a for profit company (eg google) to fix an issue fast. Because they have ressources. But to “demand” that an oss project fix something with a certain (possibly tight) timeframe.. well I’m sure you better than me, that that’s not who volunteering works
On the other hand as an ffmpeg user do you care? Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it? I mean someone could already be using the vulnerability regardless of what Google does.
>Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it?
Yes? It's in the license
>NO WARRANTY
>15. BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO
WARRANTY FOR THE LIBRARY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.
EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR
OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE LIBRARY "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE.
If I really care, I can submit a patch or pay someone to. The ffmpeg devs don't owe me anything.
Have you ever used a piece of software that DID make guarantees about being safe?
Every software I've ever used had a "NO WARRANTY" clause of some kind in the license. Whether an open-source license or a EULA. Every single one. Except, perhaps, for public-domain software that explicitly had no license, but even "licenses" like CC0 explicitly include "Affirmer offers the Work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the Work ..."
Not being told the existence of bugs is different from having a warranty on software. How would you submit a patch on a bug you were not aware of?
Google should provide a fix but it's been standard to disclose a bug after a fixed time because the lack of disclosure doesn't remove the existence of the bug. This might have to be rethought in the context of OSS bugs but an MIT license shouldn't mean other people can't disclose bugs in my project.
This program discloses security issues to the projects and only discloses them after they have had a "reasonable" chance to fix it though, and projects can request extensions before disclosure if projects plan to fix it but need more time.
Google runs this security program even on libraries they do not use at all, where it's not a demand, it's just whitehat security auditing. I don't see the meaningful difference between Google doing it and some guy with a blog doing it here.
The user is vulnerable while the problem is unfixed. Google publishing a vulnerability doesn't change the existence of the vulnerability. If Google can find it, so can others.
Making the vulnerability public makes it easy to find to exploit, but it also makes it easy to find to fix.
If it is so easy to fix, then why doesn't Google fix it? So far they've spent more effort in spreading knowledge about the vulnerability than fixing it, so I don't agree with your assessment that Google is not actively making the world worse here.
I didn't say it was easy to fix. I said a publication made it easy to find it, if someone wanted to fix something.
If you want to fix up old codecs in ffmpeg for fun, would you rather have a list of known broken codecs and what they're doing wrong; or would you rather have to find a broken codec first.
As clearly stated, most users of ffmpeg are unaware of them using it. Even them knowing about a vulnerability in ffmpeg, they wouldn't know they are affected.
Really, the burden is on those shipping products that depend on ffmpeg: they are the ones who have to fix the security issues for their customers. If Google is one of those companies, they should provide the fix in the given time.
In my case, yes, but my pipeline is closed. Processes run on isolated instances that are terminated without haste as soon as workflow ends. Even if uncaught fatal errors occur, janitor scripts run to ensure instances are terminated on a fast schedule. This isn't something running on my personal device with random content that was provided by unknown someone on the interwebs.
So while this might be a high security risk because it possibly could allow RCE, the real-world risk is very low.
Let's say that FFMPEG has a 10 CVE where a very easy stream can cause it to RCE. So what?
We are talking about software commonly for end users deployed to encode their own media. Something that rarely comes in untrusted forms. For an exploit to happen, you need to have a situation where an attacker gets out a exploited media file which people commonly transcode via FFMPEG. Not an easy task.
This sure does matter to the likes of google assuming they are using ffmpeg for their backend processing. It doesn't matter at all for just about anyone else.
You might as well tell me that `tar` has a CVE. That's great, but I don't generally go around tarring or untarring files I don't trust.
AIUI, (lib)ffmpeg is used by practically everything that does anything with video, including such definitely-security-sensitive things as Chrome, which people use to play untrusted content all the time.
Ffmpeg is a versatile toolkit used in lot of different places.
I would be shocked if any company working with user generated video from the likes of zoom or TikTok or YouTube to small apps all over which do not have it in their pipeline somewhere.
If you use a trillion dollar AI to probe open source code in ways that no hacker could, you're kind of unearthing the vulnerabilities yourself if you disclose them.
> My takeaway from the article was not that the report was a problem, but a change in approach from Google that they’d disclose publicly after X days, regardless of if the project had a chance to fix it.
That is not an accurate description? Project Zero was using a 90 day disclosure policy from the start, so for over a decade.
What changed[0] in 2025 is that they disclose earlier than 90 days that there is an issue, but not what the issue is. And actually, from [1] it does not look like that trial policy was applied to ffmpeg.
> To me its okay to “demand” from a for profit company (eg google) to fix an issue fast. Because they have ressources. But to “demand” that an oss project fix something with a certain (possibly tight) timeframe.. well I’m sure you better than me, that that’s not who volunteering works
You clearly know that no actual demands or even requests for a fix were made, hence the scare quotes. But given you know it, why call it a "demand"?
When you publicize a vulnerability you know someone doesn't have the capacity to fix according to the requested timeline, you are simultaneously increasing the visibility of the vulnerability and name-calling the maintainers. All of this increases the pressure on the maintainers, and it's fair to call that a "demand" (quotes-included). Note that we are talking about humans who will only have their motivation dwindle: it's easy to say that they should be thick-skinned and ignore issues they can't objectively fix in a timely manner, but it's demoralizing to be called out like that when everyone knows you can't do it, and you are generally doing your best.
It's similar to someone cooking a meal for you, and you go on and complain about every little thing that could have been better instead of at least saying "thank you"!
Here, Google is doing the responsible work of reporting vulnerabilities. But any company productizing ffmpeg usage (Google included) should sponsor a security team to resolve issues in high profile projects like these too.
Sure, the problem is that Google is a behemoth and their internal org structure does not cater to this scenario, but this is what the complaint is about: make your internal teams do the right thing by both reporting, but also helping fix the issue with hands-on work. Who'd argue against halving their vulnerability finding budget and using the other half to fund a security team that fixes highest priority vulnerabilities instead?
> When you publicize a vulnerability you know someone doesn't have the capacity to fix according to the requested timeline
My understanding is that the bug in question was fixed about 100 times faster than Project Zero's standard disclosure timeline. I don't know what vulnerability report your scenario is referring to, but it certainly is not this one.
> and name-calling the maintainers
Except Google did not "name-call the maintainers" or anything even remotely resembling that. You just made it up, just like GP made up the the "demands". It's pretty telling that all these supposed misdeeds are just total fabrications.
The fact that details of the issue _will_ be disclosed publicly is an implicit threat. Sure it's not an explicit threat, but it's definitely an implicit threat. So the demand, too, is implicit: fix this before we disclose publicly, or else your vulnerability will be public knowledge.
It's standard practice for commercially-sponsored software, and it doesn't necessarily fit volunteer maintained software. You can't have the same expectations.
Vulnerabilities should be publicly disclosed. Both closed and open source software are scrutinized by the good and the bad people; sitting on vulnerabilities isn't good.
Consumers of closed source software have a pretty reasonable expectation that the creator will fix it in a timely manner. They paid money, and the (generally) the creator shouldn't put the customer in a nasty place because of errors.
Consumers of open source software should have zero expectation that someone else will fix security issues. Individuals should understand this; it's part of the deal for us using software for free. Organizations that are making money off of the work of others should have the opposite of an expectation that any vulns are fixed. If they have or should have any concern about vulnerabilities in open source software, then they need to contribute to fixing the issue somehow. Could be submitting patches, paying a contractor or vendor to submit patches, paying a maintainer to submit patches, or contributing in some other way that betters the project. The contribution they pick needs to work well with the volunteers, because some of the ones I listed would absolutely be rejected by some projects -- but not by others.
The issue is that an org like Google, with its absolute mass of technical and financial resources, went looking for security vulnerabilities in open source software with the pretense of helping. But if Google (or whoever) doesn't finish the job, then they're being a piece of shit to volunteers. The rest of the job is reviewing the vulns by hand and figuring out patches that can be accepted with absolutely minimal friction.
To your point, the beginning of the expectation should be that vulns are disclosed, since otherwise we have known insecure software. The rest of the expectation is that you don't get to pretend to do a nice thing while _knowing_ that you're dumping more work on volunteers that you profit from.
In general, wasting the time of volunteers that you're benefiting from is rude.
Specifically, organizations profiting off of volunteer work and wasting their time makes them an extractive piece of shit.
The entire conflict here is that norms about what's considered responsible were developed in a different context, where vulnerability reports were generated at a much lower rate and dedicated CVE-searching teams were much less common. FFmpeg says this was "AI generated bug reports on an obscure 1990s hobby codec"; if that's accurate (I have no reason to doubt it, just no time to go check), I tend to agree that it doesn't make sense to apply the standards that were developed for vulnerabilities like "malicious PNG file crashes the computer when loaded".
I think the discussion on what standard practice should be does need to be had. This seems to be throwing blame at people following the current standard.
If the obscure coded is not included by default or cannot be triggered by any means other than being explicitly asked for, then it would be reasonable to tag it Won't Fix. If it can be triggered by other means, such as auto file type detection on a renamed file, then it doesn't matter how obscure the feature is, the exploit would affect all.
What is the alternative to a time limited embargo. I don't particularly like the idea of groups of people having exploits that they have known about for ages that haven't been publicly disclosed. That is the kind of information that finds itself in the wrong hands.
Of course companies should financially support the developers of the software they depend upon. Many do this for OSS in the form of having a paid employee that works on the project.
Specifically, FFMPEG seems to have a problem that much of their limitation of resources comes from them alienating contributors. This isn't isolated to just this bug report.
It is accurate. This is a codec that was added for archival and digital preservation purposes. It’s like adding a Unicode block for some obscure 4000 year old dead language that we have a scant half dozen examples of writing.
Why is Google deliberately running an AI process to find these bugs if they're just going to dump them all on the FFmpeg team to fix?
They have the option to pay someone to fix them.
They also have the option to not spend resources finding the bugs in the first place.
If they think these are so damn important to find that it's worth devoting those resources to, then they can damn well pay for fixing them too.
Or they can shut the hell up and let FFmpeg do its thing in the way that has kept it one of the https://xkcd.com/2347/ pieces of everyone's infrastructure for over 2 decades.
Many people are already developing and fixing FFmpeg.
How many people are actively looking for bugs? Google, and then the other guys that don't share their findings, but perhaps sell them to the highest bidder. Seems like Google is doing some good work by just picking big, popular open source projects and seeing if they have bugs, even if they don't intend to fix them. And I doubt Google was actually using the Lucas Arts video format their latest findings were about.
However, in my mind the discussion whether Google should be developing FFmpeg (beyond the codec support mentioned elsewhere in the thread) or other OSS projects is completely separate from whether they should be finding bugs in them. I believe most everyone would agree they should. They are helping OSS in other ways though, e.g. https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/google-sponsors-1-million-to-... .
Google is a significant contributor to ffmpeg by way of VP9/AV1/AV2. It's not like it's a gaping maw of open-source abuse, the company generally provides real value to the OSS ecosystem at an even lower level than ffmpeg (which is saying a lot, ffmpeg is pretty in-the-weeds already).
As to why they bother finding these bugs... it's because that's how Google does things. You don't wait for something to break or be exploited, you load your compiler up with santizers and go hunting for bugs.
Yeah this one is kind of trivial, but if the bug-finding infrastructure is already set up it would be even more stupid if Google just sat on it.
I would love to see Google contribute here, but I think that's a different issue.
Are the bug reports accurate? If so, then they are contributing just as if I found them and sent a bug report, I'd be contributing. Of course a PR that fixes the bug is much better than just a report, but reports have value, too.
The alternative is to leave it unfound, which is not a better alternative in my opinion. It's still there and potentially exploitable even when unreported.
But FFmpeg does not have the resources to fix these at the speed Google is finding them.
It's just not possible.
So Google is dedicating resources to finding these bugs
and feeding them to bad actors.
Bad actors who might, hypothetically have had the information before, but definitely do once Google publicizes them.
You are talking about an ideal situation; we are talking about a real situation that is happening in the real world right now, wherein the option of Google reports bug > FFmpeg fixes bug simply does not exist at the scale Google is doing it at.
Nobody is demanding anything. Google is just disclosing issues.
This opens up transparency of ffmpeg’s security posture, giving others the chance to fix it themselves, isolate where it’s run or build on entirely new foundations.
All this assuming the reports are in fact pointing to true security issues. Not talking about AI-slop reports.
> But appearance is operative: a security issue is something that I (as the maintainer) would need to fix regardless of who reports it
I think this is the heart of the issue and it boils off all of the unimportant details.
If it's a real, serious issue, you want to know about it and you want to fix it. Regardless of who reports it.
If it's a real, but unimportant issue, you probably at least want to track it, but aren't worried about disclosure. Regardless of who reports it.
If it's invalid, or AI slop, you probably just want to close/ignore it. Regardless of who reports it.
It seems entirely irrelevant who is reporting these issues. As a software project, ultimately you make the judgment call about what bugs you fix and what ones you don't.
But if it's a real, serious issue without an easy resolution, who is the burden on? It's not that the maintainers wouldn't fix bugs if they easily could. FFmpeg is provided "as is"[0], so everyone should be responsible for their side of things. It's not like the maintainers dumped their software on every computer and forced people to use it. Google should be responsible for their own security. I'm not adamant that Google should share the patch with others, but it would hardly be an imposition to Google if they did. And yes, I really do intend that you could replace Google with any party, big or small, commercial or noncommercial. It's painful, but no one has any inherent obligations to provide others with software in most circumstances.
[0] More or less. It seems the actual language is shied from. Is there a meaningful difference?
Well, it's open source and built by volunteers, so nobody is obligated to fix it. If FFmpeg volunteers don't want to fix it or don't have the time/bandwidth to fix it, then they won't fix it. Like any other bug or CVE in any other open source project. The burden doesn't necessarily need to be on anyone.
They aren't obligated to fix CVEs until they're exploited, and then, suddenly, they very much were obligated to fix the CVEs, and their image as FLOSS maintainers and as a project are very much tarnished.
I feel this comment is far to shallow a take. I would expect that you know better than most of HN, exactly how much a reputation security has as a cost center. Google uses ffmpeg internally, how many millions would they have to spend if they were required to not only create, but maintain ffmpeg themselves? How significant would that cost be at Google's scale?
I dont agree the following framing is accurate, but I can mention it because you've already said the important part (about how this issue exists, and mearly knowing about it doesn't create required work.) But here announcing it, and registering a CVE, Google is starting the clock. By some metrics, it was already running, but the reputational risk clearly was not. This does change priorities, and requires as urgent context switch. neither are free actions, especially not within FOSS.
To me, being someone who believes everyone, individuals and groups, have a responsibility to contribute fairly. I would frame it as Google's behavior gives the appearance weaponizing their cost center externally, given this is something Google could easily fix, but instead they shirked that responsibility to unfunded volunteers.
To be clear, I think Google (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) can and should fund more of the OSS they depend on. But this doesn’t change the fact that vulnerability reports don’t create work per se, they just reveal work that the project can choose to act on or not.
The problem isn't Google reporting vulnerabilities. It's Google using AI to find obscure bugs that affect 2 people on the planet, then making a CVE out of it, without putting any effort into fixing it themselves or funding the project. What are the ffmpeg maintainers supposed to do about this? It's a complete waste of everybody's time.
> The latest episode was sparked after a Google AI agent found an especially obscure bug in FFmpeg. How obscure? This “medium impact issue in ffmpeg,” which the FFmpeg developers did patch, is “an issue with decoding LucasArts Smush codec, specifically the first 10-20 frames of Rebel Assault 2, a game from 1995.”
1) dedicating compute resources to continuously fuzzing the entire project
2) dedicating engineering resources to validating the results and creating accurate and well-informed bug reports (in this case, a seriously underestimated security issue)
3) additionally for codecs that Google likely does not even internally use or compile, purely for the greater good of FFMPEG's user base
Needless to say, while I agree Google has a penny to spare to fund FFMPEG, and should (although they already contribute), I do not agree with funding this maintainer.
They could, but there is really no requirement on them to do so. The security flaw was discovered by Google, but it was not created by them.
Equally there is no requirement on ffmpeg to fix these CVEs nor any other.
And, of course, there is no requirement on end-users to run software from projects which do not consider untrusted-input-validation bugs to be high priority.
> And, of course, there is no requirement on end-users to run software from projects which do not consider untrusted-input-validation bugs to be high priority.
What's this even saying?
Then they're free to fork it and never use the upstream again.
What is the mission of Project Zero? Is it to build a vulnerability database, or is it to fix vulnerabilities?
If it's to fix vulnerabilities, it seems within reason to expect a patch. If the reason Google isn't sending a patch is because they truly think the maintainers can fix it better, then that seems fair. But if Google isn't sending a patch because fixing vulns "doesn't scale" then that's some pretty weak sauce.
Maybe part of the solution is creating a separate low priority queue for bug reports from groups that could fix it but chose not to.
If you are deliberately shipping insecure software, you should stop doing that. In ffmpeg's case, that means either patching the bug, or disabling the codec. They refused to do the latter because they were proud of being able to support an obscure codec. That puts the onus on them to fix the bug in it.
> Providing a real CVE is a contribution, not a burden. The ffmpeg folks can ignore it, since by all indications it's pretty minor.
Re-read the article. There's CVEs and then there's CVEs. This is the former, and they're shoving tons of those down the throats of unpaid volunteers while contributing nothing back.
What Google's effectively doing is like a food safety inspection company going to the local food bank to get the food that they operate their corporate cafeteria on just to save a buck, then calling the health department on a monthly basis to report any and all health violations they think they might have seen, while contributing nothing of help back to the food bank.
This is why many have warned against things like MIT licence. Yes, it gives you source code and does easily get incorporated into a lot of projects but it comes at the cost of potential abuse.
Yes, GPL 3 is a lot ideologically but it was trying to limit excessive leeching.
Now that I have opened the flood gates of a 20 year old debate, time to walk away.
Google Project Zero just looks for security issues in popular open source packages, regardless of if Google itself even uses those packages or not.
So I'm not sure what GPLv3 really has to do with it in this case, if it under was a "No billion dollar company allowed" non-free-but-source-available license, this same thing would have happened if the project was popular enough for Project Zero to have looked at it for security issues.
The difference is that Google does use it, though. They use it heavily. All of us in the video industry do - Google, Amazon, Disney, Sony, Viacom, or whoever. Companies you may have never heard of build it into their solutions that are used by big networks and other streaming services, too.
AGPL, with no CLA that lets the owners relicense. Then we'll see if the using corporation fully believes in open source.
There's a reason Google turned into year 2000 Microsoft "it's viral!" re. the AGPL. They're less able to ignore the intent of the license and lock away their changes.
A bunch of people who make era-defining software for free. A labor of love.
Another bunch of people who make era-defining software where they extract everything they can. From customers, transactionally. From the first bunch, pure extraction (slavery, anyone?).
Exactly. The call-out is not "please stop doing security research". It is, "if you have a lot of money to spend on security research, please spend some of it on discovering the bugs, and some on fixing them (or paying us to fix them), instead of all of it on discovering bugs too fast for us to fix them in time".
You got lower chances of getting hacked by a random file on the internet. At Project Zero level they're also not CVE seeking - it doesn't even matter at that scale, it's not an independent trying to become known.
I get the idea of publicly disclosing security issues to large well funded companies that need to be incentivized to fix them. But I think open source has a good argument that in terms of risk reward tradeoff, publicly disclosing these for small resource constrained open source project probably creates a lot more risk than reward.
In addition to your point, it seems obvious that disclosure policy for FOSS should be “when patch available” and not static X days. The security issue should certainly be disclosed - when its responsible to do so.
Now, if Google or whoever really feels like fixing fast is so important, then they could very well contribute by submitting a patch along with their issue report.
> it seems obvious that disclosure policy for FOSS should be “when patch available” and not static X days
This is very far from obvious. If google doesn't feel like prioritising a critical issue, it remains irresponsible not to warn other users of the same library.
If that’s the case why give the OSS project any time to fix at all before public disclosure? They should just publish immediately, no? Warn other users asap.
Why do you think it has to be all or nothing? They are both reasonable concerns. That's why reasonable disclosure windows are usually short but not zero.
Unless the maintainers are incompetent or uncooperative this does not feel like a good strategy. It is a good strategy on Google's side because it is easier for them to manage
> ...then they could very well contribute by submitting a patch along with their issue report.
I don't want to discourage anyone from submitting patches, but that does not necessarily remove all (or even the bulk of) the work from the maintainers. As someone who has received numerous patches to multimedia libraries from security researchers, they still need review, they often have to be rewritten, and most importantly, the issue must be understood by someone with the appropriate domain knowledge and context to know if the patch merely papers over the symptoms or resolves the underlying issue, whether the solution breaks anything else, and whether or not there might be more, similar issues lurking. It is hard for someone not deeply involved in the project to do all of those things.
> publicly disclosing these for small resource constrained open source project probably creates a lot more risk than reward.
You can never be sure that you're the only one in the world that has discovered or will discover a vulnerability, especially if the vulnerability can be found by an LLM. If you keep a vulnerability a secret, then you're leaving open a known opportunity for criminals and spying governments to find a zero day, maybe even a decade from now.
For this one in particular: AFAIK, since the codec is enabled by default, anyone who processes a maliciously crafted .mp4 file with ffmpeg is vulnerable. Being an open-source project, ffmpeg has no obligation to provide me secure software or to patch known vulnerabilities. But publicly disclosing those vulnerabilities means that I can take steps to protect myself (such as disabling this obscure niche codec that I'm literally never going to use), without any pressure on ffmpeg to do any work at all. The fact that ffmpeg commits themselves to fixing known vulnerabilities is commendable, and I appreciate them for that, but they're the ones volunteering to do that -- they don't owe it to anyone. Open-source maintainers always have the right to ignore a bug report; it's not an obligation to do work unless they make it one.
Vulnerability research is itself a form of contribution to open source -- a highly specialized and much more expensive form of contribution than contributing code. FFmpeg has a point that companies should be better about funding and contributing to open-source projects that they rely on, but telling security researchers that their highly valuable contribution is not welcome because it's not enough is absurd, and is itself an example of making ridiculous demands for free work from a volunteer in the open-source community. It sends the message that white-hat security research is not welcome, which is a deterrent to future researchers from ethically finding and disclosing vulnerabilities in the future.
As an FFmpeg user, I am better off in a world where Google disclosed this vulnerability -- regardless of whether they, FFmpeg, or anyone else wrote a patch -- because a vulnerability I know about is less dangerous than one I don't know about.
> publicly disclosing these for small resource constrained open source project probably creates a lot more risk than reward.
Not publicly disclosing it also carries risk. Library users get wrong impression that library has no vulnerabilities, while numerous bugs are reported but don't appear due to FOSS policy.
You are missing the tiny little fact that apparently a large portion of infosec people are of the opinion that insecure software must not exist. At any cost. No shades of gray.
"They could shut down three product lines with an email"
If you (Amazon, in this case) can put it that way, it seems like throwing them 10 or 20 thousand a year would simply be a good insurance policy! Any benefits you might get in goodwill and influence are a bonus.
How do you think Jeff got a 500 million dollars yacht? Not by writing checks.
But on a more serious note, it is crazy that between Google and Amazon they can not fund them with 50k each per year, so that they can pay people to work on this.
Specially Google, with Youtube, they can very easily pay them more. 100k~200k easily.
Double funny considering new-grads who may polish up some UI features or rewrite components for the 10th time will get paid 200-400K TC at these same companies. Evidently these companies value something other than straight labor.
If I had built up 500 million in a savings account to buy a yacht, giving 50k of that to FFmpeg devs would put off my ability to buy a yacht by nearly a whole day.
Boltzmann brain-wise it clearly doesn't make sense to wait that long.
> How do you think Jeff got a 500 million dollars yacht? Not by writing checks.
A rising tide lifts all yachts. If he had written the check, my instinct tells me, he would have enough for two yachts. Goodwill is an actual line item on 10Q's and 10K's. I don't know why companies think it's worth ignoring.
Nice to see coming from Google. Some other current and form Google employees were unfortunately not as professional in their interactions on Twitter in regards to this issue.
Unfortunately, nobody not on Twitter can see anything except the first message, which just appears to be some corporate-deflection-speak.
It’s a trillion dollar company. I’m sure they could find rifle through their couch cushions and find more than enough money and under-utilised devs to contribute finance or patches.
I'm not being dismissive. I understand the imperetive of identifying and fixing vulnerabilities. I also understand the detrimental impact that these problems can potentially have on Google.
What I don't understand is the choice to have a public facing project about this. Can anyone shine a light on this?
And pushing forward the idea that "responsible disclosure" doesn't mean the software creator can just sit on a bug for as long as they want and act superior and indignant when the researcher gives up and publishes anyway because the creator is dragging their ass.
Project Zero's public existence came out of the post-Snowden period where Google was publicly pissed at the NSA/etc for spying on them (e.g. by tapping their fiber links).
A lot of their research involves stuff they personally benefit from if they were secure. ffmpeg, libxml2, various kinds of mobile device firmware, Linux kernels and userspace components, you name it.
Their security team gaining experience on other projects can teach them some more diversity in terms of (malware) approaches and vulnerability classes, which can in turn be used to secure their own software better.
For other projects there's some vanity/reputation to be gained. Having some big names with impressive resumes publicly talk about their work can help attract talent.
Lastly, Google got real upset that the NSA spied on them (without their knowledge, they can't help against warrants of course).
Then again, there's probably also some Silicon Valley bullshit money being thrown around. Makes you wonder why they don't invest a little bit more to pay someone to submit a fix.
I would imagine it's mostly a PR/marketing thing. That way the researchers can point to being part of something other people know about, and Google gets positive PR (though maybe not in this case) for spending resources on making software in general more secure.
The vulnerability in question is a Use After Free. Google used AI to find this bug, it would've taken them 3 seconds to fix it.
Burning cash to generate spam bug reports to burden volunteer projects when you have the extra cash to burn to just fix the damn issue leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.
Notably, the vulnerability is also in a part which isn't included by default and nobody uses. I'm not sure that even warrants a CVE? A simple bug report would have probably been fine. If they think this is really a CVE, a bug fix commit would have been warranted.
One problem here is that CVE scoring is basically entirely bugged, something scored 8.7 could be an RCE exploit or a "may be able to waste CPU" issue.
That's the difference between "it may or may not be that there's someone who cares" versus "no one should be running this software anywhere in the general vicinity of untrusted inputs".
> One problem here is that CVE scoring is basically entirely bugged, something scored 8.7 could be an RCE exploit or a "may be able to waste CPU" issue.
+100000
My favorite 8.x or higher CVEs are the ones where you would have to take untrusted user input, bypass all the standard ways to ingest and handle that type of data, and pass it into some internal function of a library. And then the end result is that a regex call becomes more expensive.
You’re right about scoring, at least largely. Let’s not conflate the CVE system and the CVSS system, though. They are related but distinct. CVE is just an identifier system.
It is included in most builds of ffmpeg, for example in most Linux packages or in Windows build linked to on ffmpeg.org that I use. But yeah, it's a very niche format that nobody uses.
AIUI there's no such thing as "really a CVE". A CVE is merely a standardized identifier for a bug so you can call it "CVE-2025-XXXXX" rather than "that use-after-free Google found in ffmpeg with AI." It doesn't imply anything else about the bug, except that it may impact security. The Linux kernel assigns one to every bugfix that may impact security (which is most kernel bugs) to avoid controversy about whether they should be assigned.
Use After Free takes 3 seconds to fix if you defer free until the end of the program. If you have to do something else, or you don't want to leak memory, then it probably takes longer than 3 seconds.
Probably the right solution is to disable this codec. You should have to make a choice to compile with it; although if you're running ffmpeg in a context where security matters, you really should be hand picking the enabled codecs anyway.
Yes - more than a sour taste. This is hideous behavior. It is the polar opposite of everything intelligent engineers have understood regarding free-and-open software for decades.
I don't understand the rational for announcing that a vulnerability in project X was discovered before the patch is released. I read the project zero blogspot announcement but it doesn't make much sense to me. Google claims this is help downsteam users but that feels like a largely non-issue to me.
If you announce a vulnerability (unspecified) is found in a project before the patch is released doesn't that just incentivize bad actors to now direct their efforts at finding a vulnerability in that project?
Maybe for a small project? I think the difference here is rather minimal. Everybody "knows" code often has security bugs so this announcement wouldn't technically be new information. For a large project such as ffmpeg, I doubt there is a lack of effort in finding exploits in ffmpeg given how widely it is used.
I don't see why actors would suddenly reallocate large amounts of effort especially since a patch is now known to be coming for the issue that was found and thus the usefulness of the bug (even if found) is rather limited.
There are some rhetorical slights of hand. If Google does the work to find and report vulnerabilities, great. Nice contribution regardless of who provides it. The OSS developer can ignore it by accepting the consequences that will be. They are not forced to fix it except by themselves.
The many large corporations should be funding these tools they depend on to increase time allocations and thus ability to be responsive but this isn't an either/or. These type of thinking erode the communities of such projects and minds of the contributors.
FWIW I've totally been that developer trapped in that perspective so I empathize, there are simply better mental stances available.
Sometimes it's hard: for many kinds of projects, I don't think anyone would use them if they were not open source (or at least source-available). Just like I wouldn't use a proprietary password manager, and I wouldn't use WhatsApp if I had a choice. Rather I use Signal because it's open source.
How to get people to use your app if it's not open source, and therefore not free?
For some projects, it feels better to have some people use it even if you did it for free than to just not do it at all (or do it and keep it in a drawer), right?
I am wondering, I haven't found a solution. Until now I've been open sourcing stuff, and overall I think it has maybe brought more frustration, but on the other hand maybe it has some value as my "portfolio" (though that's not clear).
They should set up a foundation/LLC if they don't have one already and require a support contract for fixing any bugs in niche codecs. Target the 95%-98% use cases for "free" work. If someone gives them a CVE on something ancient, just note it with an issue tracker and that the problem is currently unsponsored. Have default build flags to omit all the ancient/buggy stuff. If nobody is willing to pay to fix all the ancient crap, then nobody should be using it. But if someone is willing to pay, then it gets fixed.
Watch places like Amazon and Google suddenly stop updating and trying to find alternatives.
Like how Apple stopped using up to date the GNU tools in 2008 because of GPL3. That moved showed me then that Apple did not want you to use your computer as your computer.
Well, to continue that timeline. "Big Tech" freezes their version to the last gpl'ed version, and each commences their own (non-trivial effort) to make their own version (assuming the last gpl'ed version was not feature-complete for all their future uses).
And of course, they won't share with each other. So another driver would be fear of a slight competitive disadvantage vs other-big-tech-monstrosity having a better version.
Now, in this scenario, some tech CEO, somewhere has this brilliant bright spark.
"Hey, instead of dumping all these manhours & resources into DIYing it, with no guarantee that we still won't be left behind - why don't we just throw 100k at the original oss project. We'll milk the publicity, and ... we won't have to do the work, and ... my competitors won't be able to use it"
Honestly, I kind of think that ffmpeg should just document that it's not secure and that you're expected to run it in a sandbox if you plan to use it on possibly-malicious input. All the big cloud users and browsers are doing this already, so it would hardly even change anything.
ffmpeg is complaining that security bugs are such a drag that it's driving people away from their hobby/passion projects. Well, if fixing security bugs isn't your passion, why not just say that? Say it's not your priority, and if someone else wants it to be a priority, they can write the patches. Problem solved?
> “The position of the FFmpeg X account is that somehow disclosing vulnerabilities is a bad thing. Google provides more assistance to open source software projects than almost any other organization, and these debates are more likely to drive away potential sponsors than to attract them.”
This position likely to drive away maintainers. Generally the maintainers need these projects less than the big companies that use them. I'm not sure what Google's endgame is
Is it unreasonable to ask that if a massive company funds someone to find a CVE in an open source project, they should also submit a patch? Google is a search company. Seems kind of... evil... to pay your devs to find holes in something with nothing to do with searching, then refuse to pay them to fix the problem they noticed.
I would suggest that FFmpeg spin up a commercial arm that gets support contracts with Google, Amazon, etc, but with a tight leash so that it does not undermine the open source project. Would need clean guidance as to what the commercial arm does and does not.
While I don't think FFmpeg's response is a great one ("fund us or stop submitting bugs"); I think Google is being pretty shitty here. For a company that prides itself in its engineering prowess and contributions to the OSS community (as they like to remind me all the time) to behave this way is just all around shitty.
Submit the bug AND the patch and be done with it; don't make it someone else's problem when it's an OSS library/tool. A for-profit vendor? Absolutely. But this? Hell naw.
In general it is not good when companies get too much power. See how shopify is eating away the ruby infrastructure right now after RubyCentral panicked when shopify blackmailed the community by taking away funding. Of course it is their money, but the whole ecosystem suddenly submitting to one huge company, really really sucks to no ends. Hobbyists are at the weakest here.
If it just were that simple.
The reality is that this is a very slippery slope and you won’t get a support contract just like that with a “tight leash”
I don't consider a security issue to be a "standard bug." I need to look at it, and [maybe] fix it, regardless of who reported it.
But in my projects, I have gotten requests (sometimes, demands) that I change things like the published API (a general-purpose API), to optimize some niche functionality for one user.
I'll usually politely decline these, and respond with an explanation as to why, along with suggestions for them to add it, after the fact.
It’s a security issue for a stream type almost nobody uses. It’s a little like saying your graphics program in 2025 is exploitable by a malformed PCX file, or your music player has a security bug only when playing an Impulse Tracker module.
Sure, triage it. It shouldn’t be publicly disclosed within a week of the report though, because the fix is still a relatively low priority.
Security is adversarial. It doesn't matter whether the users intentionally use the vulnerable codec. What matters is whether an adversary can make the users to use it. Given the codec is compiled in by default on Ubuntu, and given that IIUC the bug would already be triggered by ffmpeg's file format probing, it seems pretty likely that the answer to that is yes.
Yes, security is by definition adversarial. Thanks for the most basic lesson.
How are you getting ffmpeg to process a stream or file type different from the one you’re expecting? Most use cases of ffmpeg are against known input and known output types. If you’re just stuffing user-supplied files through your tools, then yes you have a different threat model.
> How are you getting ffmpeg to process a stream or file type different from the one you’re expecting?
... That is how ffmpeg works? With default settings it auto-detects the input codec from the bitstream, and the output codec from the extension. You have to go out of your way to force the input codec and disable the auto-detection, and I don't think most software using ffmpeg as a backend would force the user to manually do it, because users can't be trusted to know those details.
If no one uses the stream type, then not fixing the bug won't hurt.
The people who do use the stream type are at risk, and have been at risk all along. They need to stop using the stream type, or get the bug fixed, or triage the but as not exploitable.
It’s a reproducible use-after-free in a codec that ships by default with most desktop and server distributions.
The recent iOS zero-day (CVE-2025-43300) targeted the rarely used DNG image format. How long before this FFMPEG vulnerability is exploited to compromise legacy devices in the wild, I wonder?
I’m not a fan of this grandstanding for arguably questionable funding. (I surely would not fund those who believe these issues are slop.) I’d like to think most contributors already understand the severity and genuinely care about keeping FFMPEG secure.
Bugs in little-used corners of the project are a massive red flag, that's how some of the most serious OpenSSL bugs have emerged. If the code is in there, and someone can trigger it with a crafted input, then it is as bad as any other bug.
I understand ffmpeg being angry at the workload but this is how it is with large open source projects. Ffmpeg has no obligation to fix any of this. Open source is a gift and is provided as is. If Google demanded a fix I could see this being an issue. As it is right now it just seems like a bad look. If they wanted compensation then they should change the model, there's nothing wrong with that. Google found a bug, they reported it. If it's a valid bug then it's a valid bug end of story. Software owes it to its users to be secure, but again it's up to the maintainers if they also believe that. Maybe this pushes Google to make an alternative, which I'd be excited for.
> That does not impact their business or their operations in any way whatsoever.
I don't know what tools and backends they use exactly, but working purely by statistics, I'm sure some place in Google's massive cloud compute empire is relying on ffmpeg to process data from the internet.
> ffmpeg owes me nothing. I haven't paid them a dime.
That is true. At the same time Google also does not owe the ffmpeg devs anything either. It applies both ways. The whole "pay us or we won't fix this" makes no sense.
> Google also does not owe the ffmpeg devs anything either.
Then they can stop reporting bugs with their assinine one size fits all "policy." It's unwelcome and unnecessary.
> It applies both ways.
The difference is I do not presume things upon the ffmpeg developers. I just use their software.
> The whole "pay us or we won't fix this" makes no sense.
Pay us or stop reporting obscure bugs in unused codecs found using "AI" scanning, or at least, if you do, then change your disclosure policy for those "bugs." That's the actual argument and is far more reasonable.
I read this as nobody wants CVEs open on their product, so you might feel forced to fix them. I find it more understandable if we talk about web frameworks: Wordpress don't want security CVEs open for months or years, or users would be upset they introduce new features while neglecting safety.
I am a nobody, and whenever I found a bug I work extra to attach a fix in the same issue. Google should do the same.
FFmpeg should just dual license at this point. If you're wanting shit fixed. You pay for it (based on usage) or GTFO. Should solve all of the current issues around this.
You mean, Google reports a bug, and ffmpeg devs say "GTFO"? Let's assume this is a real bug: is that what you would the ffmpeg developers to say to Google?
I absolutely understand the issue that a filthy-rich company tries to leech off of real unpaid humans. I don't understand how that issue leads to "GTFO, we won't fix these bugs". That makes no sense to me.
Amusing. I suppose the intended optional behavior is for Google to fix internally then run the public PR. Less optimal for us normal users since the security issue will be visible publicly in the PR until merging, though it won't affect Google (who will carry the fixed code before disclosure).
And maybe it's fine to have AI-generated articles that summarize Twitter threads for HN, but this is not a good summarization of the discussion that unfolded in the wake of this complaint. For one, it doesn't mention a reply from Google security, which you would think should be pretty relevant here.
Forking puts you in another hell as Google. Now you have to pay someone to maintain your fork! Maybe for a project that’s well and fully complete that’s OK. But something like FFmpeg is gonna get updated all the time, as the specs for video codecs are tweaked or released.
Their choice becomes to:
- maintain a complex fork, constantly integrating from upstream.
- Or pin to some old version and maybe go through a Herculean effort to rebase when something they truly must have merges upstream.
- Or genuinely fork it and employ an expert in this highly specific domain to write what will often end up being parallel features and security patches to mainline FFmpeg.
Or, of course, pay someone in doing OSS to fix it in mainline. Which is the beauty of open source; that’s genuinely the least painful option, and also happens to be the one that benefits the community the most.
Any time I have tried to fix a bug in an open source project I was immediately struck down with abusive attitudes about how I didn't do something exactly the way they wanted it that isn't really documented.
If that's what I have to expect, I'd rather not even interact with them at all.
I don't think this is what typically happens. Many of my bug reports were handled.
For instance, I reported to the xorg-bug tracker that one app behaved oddly when I did --version on it. I was batch-reporting all xorg-applications via a ruby script.
Alan Coopersmith, the elderly hero that he is, fixed this not long after my report. (It was a real bug; granted, a super-small one, but still.)
I could give many more examples here. (I don't remember the exact date but I think I reported this within the last 3 years or so. Unfortunately reporting bugs in xorg-apps is ... a bit archaic. I also stopped reporting bugs to KDE because I hate bugzilla. Github issues spoiled me, they are so easy and convenient to use.)
Is there really slop here though? It sounds like the specific case identified was a real use after free in an obscure file format but which is enabled by default.
If it was slop they could complain that it was wasting their time on false or unimportant reports, instead they seem to be complaining that the program reported a legitimate security issue?
Google leveraging AI to spam ffmpeg devs with bugs that range from real to obscure to wrongly reported may be annoying. But even then I still don't think Google is to be held accountable for reporting bugs nor is it required to fix bugs. Note: I do think Google should help pay for costs and what not. If they were a good company they would not only report bugs but also have had developers fix the bugs, but they are selfish and greedy, everyone knows that. Even then they are not responsible for bugs in ffmpeg. And IF the bug report is valid, then I also see no problem.
The article also confuses things. For instance:
"Many in the FFmpeg community argue, with reason, that it is unreasonable for a trillion-dollar corporation like Google, which heavily relies on FFmpeg in its products, to shift the workload of fixing vulnerabilities to unpaid volunteers"
How could Google do that? It is not Google's decision. That is up to volunteers. If they refuse to fix bug reports reported from Google then this is fine. But it is THEIR decision, not Google.
"With this policy change, GPZ announces that it has reported an issue on a specific project within a week of discovery, and the security standard 90-day disclosure clock then starts, regardless of whether a patch is available or not."
Well, many opinions here. I think ALL bugs and exploits should be INSTANTLY AND WITHOUT ANY DELAY, be made fully transparent and public. I understand the other side of the medal too, bla bla we need time to fix it bla bla. I totally understand it. Even then I believe the only truthful, honest way to deal with this, is 100% transparency at all times. This includes when there are negative side effects too, such as open holes. I believe in transparency, not in secrecy. There can not be any compromise here IMO.
"Many volunteer open source program maintainers and developers feel this is massively unfair to put them under such pressure when Google has billions to address the problem."
So what? Google reports issues. You can either fix that or not. Either way is a strategy. It is not Google's fault when software can be exploited, unless they wrote the code. Conversely, the bug or flaw would still exist in the code EVEN IF GOOGLE WOULD NOT REPORT IT. So I don't understand this part. I totally understand the issue of Google being greedy, but this here is not solely about Google's greed. This is also how a project deals with (real) issues (if they are not real then you can ask Google why they send out so much spam).
That Google abuses AI to spam down real human beings is evil and shabby. I am all for ending Google on this planet - it does so much evil. But either it is a bug, or not. I don't understand the opinion of ffmpeg devs "because it is Google, we want zero bug reports". That just makes no sense.
"The fundamental problem remains that the FFmpeg team lacks the financial and developer resources to address a flood of AI-created CVEs."
Well, that is more an issue in how to handle Google spamming down people. Sue them in court so that they stop spamming. But if it is a legit bug report, why is that a problem? Are ffmpeg devs concerned about the code quality being bad? If it is about money then even though I think all of Google's assets should be seized and the CEOs that have done so much evil in the last 20 years be put to court, it really is not their responsibility to fix anything written by others. That's just not how software engineering works; it makes no sense. It seems people confuse ethics with responsibilities here. The GPL doesn't mandate code fixing to be done; it mandates that if you publish a derivative etc... of the code, that code has to be published under the same licence and made available to people. That's about it, give or take. It doesn't say corporations or anyone else HAS to fix something.
"On the other hand, security experts are certainly right in thinking that FFmpeg is a critical part of the Internet’s technology framework and that security issues do need to be made public responsibly and addressed."
I am all for that too, but even stricter - all security issues are to be made public instantly, without delay, fully and completely. I went to open source because I got tired of Microsoft. Why would I want to go back to evil? Not being transparent here is no valid excuse IMO.
"The reality is, however, that without more support from the trillion-dollar companies that profit from open source, many woefully underfunded, volunteer-driven critical open-source projects will no longer be maintained at all."
Wait - so it is Google's fault if projects die due to lack of funding? How does that explanation work?
You can choose another licence model. Many choose BSD/MIT. Others choose GPL. And so forth.
"For example, Wellnhofer has said he will no longer maintain libxml2 in December. Libxml2 is a critical library in all web browsers, web servers, LibreOffice and numerous Linux packages. We don’t need any more arguments; we need real support for critical open source programs before we have another major security breach."
Yes, that is a problem - the funding part. I completely agree. I still don't understand the "logic" of trying to force corporations to have to do so when they are not obliged. If you don't want corporations to use your code, specify that in the licence. The GPL does not do that. I am confused about this "debate" because it makes no real sense to me from an objective point of view. The only part that I can understand pisses off real humans is when Google uses AI as a pester-spam attack orgy. Hopefully a court agrees and spits up any company with more than 100 developers into smaller entities the moment they use AI to spam real human beings.
Its a special kind of irony to post AI slop complaining about someone's ai slop that isn't actually ai slop just devs whining about being expected to maintain their code instead of being able to extort the messengers to do the work for them.
“How dare ffmpeg be so arrogant!
Don’t they know who we are?
Fork ffmpeg and kill the project! I grant a budget of 30 million to crush this dissent! Open source projects must know who’s boss! I’ll stomp em like a union!”
…. overheard at a meeting of CEO and CTO at generic evil mega tech corp recently.
They obviously need to be reminded that the only reason Google has to care about FLOSS projects is when they can effectively use them to create an advertising panopticon under the company's complete control.
They probably want to drown you in CVEs to force deprecation on the world and everybody into their system like they do with everything else they touch.
This is dumb. Obscurity doesn’t create security. It’s unfortunate if ffmpeg doesn’t have the money to fix reported bugs but that doesn’t mean they should be ignorant of them. I don’t see any entitlement out of Google either - I expected this article would have a GH issue thread with a whiny YouTube engineer yelling at maintainers.
The first thing you can do is actually read the article. The question is not about the security reports but Google's policy on disclosing the vulnerability after x days. It works for crazy lazy corps. But not for OSS projects.
Agreed that obscurity is not security. However we don't want to make it easy for hackers to get a catalog of vulnerabilities to pick and choose from. I think the issue is public disclosure of vulnerabilities after a deadline. The hobbyists can't just keep up.
Google might be aiming to replace ffmpeg as the world's best media professor. Remember how Jia Tan (under different names) flooded xz with work before stepping up as a maintainer.
Google, through YouTube and YouTube TV, already runs one of the most significant video processing lines of business in the world. If they had any interest in supplanting FFmpeg with their own software stack, they wouldn't need to muck around with CVEs to do so.
Please bro, please, fix our bugs bro, just this one bug bro, last one I swear, you and I will make big money, you are the best bro, I love you bro.
-- big tech companies
Just mark CVEs as bugs and get to them when you can. In this case, if Google doesn't like it, then so be it. It'll get fixed eventually. Don't like how long it takes? Pay someone to contribute back. Until then, hurry up and wait.
FFmpeg should stop fixing security bugs reported by Google, MS, Amazon, Meta etc. and instead wait for security patches from them. If FFmpeg maintainers will leave it exposed, those companies will rush to fixing it, because they'd be screwed otherwise. Every single one of them is dependent on FFmpeg exactly as shown in https://xkcd.com/2347/
Because they are making more money in profit than some mid-sized American cities' economies do in a year while contributing nothing back. If they don't want massive security vulnerabilities in their services using FFmpeg, maybe they need to pony up about .1 seconds' worth of their quarterly earnings to the project either in cash or in manpower.
It's not FFmpeg's problem if someone uses a vulnerability to pwn YouTube, it's Google's problem.
Also, in the article, they mention that Google's using AI to look for bugs and report them, and one of them that it found was a problem in the code that handles the rendering of a few frames of a game from 1995. That sort of slop isn't helping anyone. It's throwing the signal-to-noise ratio of the bug filings way the hell off.
> Many in the FFmpeg community argue, with reason, that it is unreasonable for a trillion-dollar corporation like Google, which heavily relies on FFmpeg in its products, to shift the workload of fixing vulnerabilities to unpaid volunteers.
That's capitalism, they need to quit their whining or move to North Korea. /s The whole point is to maximize value to the shareholders, and the more work they can shove onto unpaid volunteers, the move money they can shove into stock buybacks or dividends.
The system is broken. IMHO, there outta be a law mandating reasonable payments from multi-billion dollar companies to open source software maintainers.
Not too fond of maintainers getting too uppity about this stuff. I get that it can be frustrating to receive bug report after bug report from people who are unwilling or unable to contribute to the code base, or at the very least to donate to the team.
But the way I see it, a bug report is a bug report, no matter how small or big the bug or the team, it should be addressed.
I don’t know, I’m not exactly a pillar of the FOSS community with weight behind my words.
When you already work 40+ hours a week and big companies suddenly start an AI snowblower that shoots a dozen extra hours of work every week at you without doing anything to balance that (like, for instance, also opening PRs with patches that fix the bugs), the relationship starts feeling like being an unpaid employee of their project.
What's the point of just showering these things with bug reports when the same tool (or a similar one) can also apparently fix the problem too?
> it can be frustrating to receive bug report after bug report from people
As the article states, these are AI-generated bug reports. So it's a trillion-dollar company throwing AI slop over the wall and demanding a 90-day turn around from unpaid volunteers.
That is completely irrelevant, the gross part is that (if true) they are demanding them to be fixed in a given time. Sounds like the epitome of entitlement to me, to say the least.
No one is demanding anything, the report itself is a 90 day grace period before being publicly published. If the issues are slop then what exactly is your complaint?
It’s a reproducible use-after-free in a codec that ships by default with most desktop and server distributions. It can be leveraged in an exploit chain to compromise a system.
I'm not a Google fan, but if the maintainers are unable to understand that, I welcome a fork.
There is a convergence of very annoying trends happening: more and more are garbage found and written using AI and with an impact which is questionable at best, the way CVE are published and classified is idiotic and platform founding vulnerability research like Google are more and more hostile to projects leaving very little time to actually work on fixes before publishing.
This is leading to more and more open source developers throwing the towel.
You could argue that, but I think that a bug is the software failing to do what it was specified, or what it promised to do. If security wasn't promised, it's not a bug.
Which is exactly the case here. This CVE is for a hobby codec written to support digital preservation of a some obscure video files from the 90’s that are used nowhere else. No security was promised.
They are not published in project bug trackers and are managed completely differently so no, personally, I don't view CVE as bug reports. Also, please, don't distrort what I say and omit part of my comment, thank you.
Some of them are not even bugs in the traditional sense of the world but expected behaviours which can lead to unsecure side effects.
It seems like you might misunderstand what CVEs are? They're just identifiers.
This was a bug, which caused an exploitable security vulnerability. The bug was reported to ffmpeg, over their preferred method for being notified about vulnerabilities in the software they maintain. Once ffmpeg fixed the bug, a CVE number was issued for the purpose of tracking (e.g. which versions are vulnerable, which were never vulnerable, which have a fix).
Having a CVE identifier is important because we can't just talk about "the ffmpeg vulnerability" when there have been a dozen this year, each with different attack surfaces. But it really is just an arbitrary number, while the bug is the actual problem.
I'm not misunderstanding anything. CVE involves a third party and it's not just a number. It's a number and an evaluation of severity.
Things which are usually managed inside a project now have a visibility outside of it. You might justify it as you want like the need to have an identifier. It doesn't fundamentally change how that impacts the dynamic.
Also, the discussion is not about a specific bug. It's a general discussion regarding how Google handles disclosure in the general case.
From TFA this was telling:
Thus, as Mark Atwood, an open source policy expert, pointed out on Twitter, he had to keep telling Amazon to not do things that would mess up FFmpeg because, he had to keep explaining to his bosses that “They are not a vendor, there is no NDA, we have no leverage, your VP has refused to help fund them, and they could kill three major product lines tomorrow with an email. So, stop, and listen to me … ”
I agree with the headline here. If Google can pay someone to find bugs, they can pay someone to fix them. How many time have managers said "Don't come to me with problems, come with solutions"
I've been a proponent of upstreaming fixes for open source software.
Why? - It makes continued downstream consumption easier, you don't have to rely on fragile secret patches. - It gives back to projects that helped you to begin with, it's a simple form of paying it forward. - It all around seems like the "ethical" and "correct" thing to do.
Unfortunately, in my experience, there's often a lot of barriers within companies to upstream. Reasons can be everything from compliance, processes, you name it... It's unfortunate.
I have a very distinct recollection of talks about hardware aspirations and upstreaming software fixes at a large company. The cultural response was jarring.
How could ffmpeg maintainers kill three major AWS product lines with an email?
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."
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.
Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in other open source projects.
But if it gets relicensed, they would still be able to use the current version. Amazon definitely would be able to fund an independent fork.
Sounds like it would be a lot of churn for nothing; if they can fund a fork, then they could fund the original project, no?
They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork.
It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.
If they want that level of control, reimburse for all the prior development too. - ie: buy that business.
As it stands, they're just abusing someone's gift.
Like jerks.
There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.
There is also the AGPL.
That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either.
In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.
If they can fund a fork, they can continue business as usual until the need arises
A fork is more expensive to maintain than funding/contributing to the original project. You have to duplicate all future work yourselves, third party code starts expecting their version instead of your version, etc.
It still takes expensive humans to do this so they are incentivized to use the free labor.
Yes, definitely. I was just saying that if the license ever did change, they would move to an in-house library. In fact, they would probably release the library for consumer use as an AWS product.
Wouldn’t that only affect new versions and current versions are still licensed under the old license ?
I'd guess Prime Video heavily relies on ffmpeg, then you got Elastic Transcode and the Elemental Video Services. Probably Cloudfront also has special things for streaming that rely on ffmpeg.
The "kill it with an email" probably means that whoever said this is afraid that some usecase there wouldn't stand up to an audit by the usual patent troll mothercluckers. The patents surrounding video are so complex, old and plentiful that I'd assume full compliance is outright impossible.
AWS MediaConvert as well which is a huge API (in surface it covers) which is under Elemental but is kinda it's own thing - willing to bet (though I don't know) that that is ffmpeg somewhere underneath.
The API manual for it is nearly 4000 pages and it can do insane stuff[1].
I had to use it at last job(TM), it's not terrible API wise.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/mediaconvert/latest/apirefe... CAUTION: big PDF.
> "Don't come to me with problems, come with solutions"
The problem is, the issue in the article is explicitly named as "CVE slop", so if the patch is of the same quality, it might require quite some work anyway.
The linked report seems to me to be the furthest thing from "slop". It is an S-tier bug report that includes a complete narrative, crash artifacts, and detailed repro instructions. I can't believe anyone is complaining about what is tied for the best bug report I have ever seen. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/440183164?pli=1
It's a good quality bug report.
But it's also a bug report about the decoder for "SANM ANIM v0" - a format so obscure almost all the search results are the bug report itself. Possibly a format exclusive to mid-1990s LucasArts games [1]
Pretty crazy that ffmpeg supports the codec in the first place, IMHO.
I can understand volunteers not wanting to sink time into maintaining a codec to play a video format that hasn't been used since the Clinton administration. gstreamer divides their plugins into 'good', 'bad' and 'ugly' to give them somewhere to stash unmaintained codecs.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250419105551/https://wiki.mult...
It's a codec that is enabled by default at least on major Linux distributions, and that will be processed by ffmpeg without any extra flags. Anyone playing an untrusted video file without explictly overriding the codec autodetection is vulnerable.
The format being obscure and having no real usage doesn't help when it's the attackers creating the files. The obscure formats are exposing just as much attack surface as the common ones.
> Pretty crazy that ffmpeg supports the codec in the first place, IMHO.
Yes.
Yeah but as you can see from the bug report ffmpeg automatically triggers the codec based on file magic, so it is possible that if you run some kind of network service or anything that handles hostile data an attacker could trigger the bug.
Google is not paying anyone to find bugs. They are running AIs indiscriminately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Zero
Someone is making the tools to find these bugs. It's not like they're telling ChatGPT "go find bugs lol"
Someone started it running, they are responsible for the results.
Still, they are paying for the computing resources needed to run the AI/agents etc.
They certainly paid someone to run the so-called AIs.
I’m an open source maintainer, so I empathize with the sentiment that large companies appear to produce labor for unpaid maintainers by disclosing security issues. But appearance is operative: a security issue is something that I (as the maintainer) would need to fix regardless of who reports it, or would otherwise need to accept the reputational hit that comes with not triaging security reports. That’s sometimes perfectly fine (it’s okay for projects to decide that security isn’t a priority!), but you can’t have it both ways.
If google bears no role in fixing the issues it finds and nobody else is being paid to do it either, it functionally is just providing free security vulnerability research for malicious actors because almost nobody can take over or switch off of ffmpeg.
I don’t think vulnerability researchers are having trouble finding exploitable bugs in FFmpeg, so I don’t know how much this actually holds. Much of the cost center of vulnerability research is weaponization and making an exploit reliable against a specific set of targets.
(The argument also seems backwards to me: Google appears to use a lot of not-inexpensive human talent to produce high quality reports to projects, instead of dumping an ASan log and calling it a day. If all they cared about was shoveling labor onto OSS maintainers, they could make things a lot easier for themselves than they currently do!)
So your claim is that buggy software is better than documented buggy software?
I think so, yes. Certainly it's more effort to both find and exploit a bug than to simply exploit an existing one someone else found for you.
Yeah it's more effort, but I'd argue that security through obscurity is a super naive approach. I'm not on Google's side here, but so much infrastructure is "secured" by gatekeeping knowledge.
I don't think you should try to invoke the idea of naivete when you fail to address the unhappy but perfectly simple reality that the ideal option doesn't exist, is a fantasy that isn't actually available, and among the available options, even though none are good, one is worse than another.
"obscurity isn't security" is true enough, as far as it goes, but is just not that far.
And "put the bugs that won't be fixed soon on a bill board" is worse.
The super naive approach is ignoring that and thinking that "fix the bugs" is a thing that exists.
it’s not a claim it’s common sense that’s why we have notice periods
I guess the question that a person at Google who discovers a bug they don’t personally have time to fix is, should they report the bug at all? They don’t necessarily know if someone else will be able to pick it up. So the current “always report” rule makes sense since you don’t have to figure out if someone can fix it.
The same question applies if they have time to fix it in six months, since that presumably still gives attackers a large window of time.
In this case the bug was so obscure it’s kind of silly.
My takeaway from the article was not that the report was a problem, but a change in approach from Google that they’d disclose publicly after X days, regardless of if the project had a chance to fix it.
To me its okay to “demand” from a for profit company (eg google) to fix an issue fast. Because they have ressources. But to “demand” that an oss project fix something with a certain (possibly tight) timeframe.. well I’m sure you better than me, that that’s not who volunteering works
On the other hand as an ffmpeg user do you care? Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it? I mean someone could already be using the vulnerability regardless of what Google does.
>Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it?
Yes? It's in the license
>NO WARRANTY
>15. BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE LIBRARY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE LIBRARY "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
If I really care, I can submit a patch or pay someone to. The ffmpeg devs don't owe me anything.
All the license means is that I can’t sue them. It doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Just because software makes no guarantees about being safe doesn’t mean I want it to be unsafe.
If the software makes no guarantees about being safe, then you should assume it is unsafe.
Have you ever used a piece of software that DID make guarantees about being safe?
Every software I've ever used had a "NO WARRANTY" clause of some kind in the license. Whether an open-source license or a EULA. Every single one. Except, perhaps, for public-domain software that explicitly had no license, but even "licenses" like CC0 explicitly include "Affirmer offers the Work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the Work ..."
Not being told the existence of bugs is different from having a warranty on software. How would you submit a patch on a bug you were not aware of?
Google should provide a fix but it's been standard to disclose a bug after a fixed time because the lack of disclosure doesn't remove the existence of the bug. This might have to be rethought in the context of OSS bugs but an MIT license shouldn't mean other people can't disclose bugs in my project.
This is a fantastic argument for the universe where Google does not disclose vulnerability until the maintainers had had reasonable time to fix it.
In this world the user is left vulnerable because attackers can use published vulnerabilities that the maintainers are to overwhelmed to fix
This program discloses security issues to the projects and only discloses them after they have had a "reasonable" chance to fix it though, and projects can request extensions before disclosure if projects plan to fix it but need more time.
Google runs this security program even on libraries they do not use at all, where it's not a demand, it's just whitehat security auditing. I don't see the meaningful difference between Google doing it and some guy with a blog doing it here.
Google is a multi-billion dollar company, which is paying people to find these bugs in the first place.
That's a pretty core difference.
The user is vulnerable while the problem is unfixed. Google publishing a vulnerability doesn't change the existence of the vulnerability. If Google can find it, so can others.
Making the vulnerability public makes it easy to find to exploit, but it also makes it easy to find to fix.
If it is so easy to fix, then why doesn't Google fix it? So far they've spent more effort in spreading knowledge about the vulnerability than fixing it, so I don't agree with your assessment that Google is not actively making the world worse here.
I didn't say it was easy to fix. I said a publication made it easy to find it, if someone wanted to fix something.
If you want to fix up old codecs in ffmpeg for fun, would you rather have a list of known broken codecs and what they're doing wrong; or would you rather have to find a broken codec first.
> If Google can find it, so can others.
While true, Only Google has google infrastructure, this presupposes that 100% of all published exploits would be findable.
As clearly stated, most users of ffmpeg are unaware of them using it. Even them knowing about a vulnerability in ffmpeg, they wouldn't know they are affected.
Really, the burden is on those shipping products that depend on ffmpeg: they are the ones who have to fix the security issues for their customers. If Google is one of those companies, they should provide the fix in the given time.
They could be, and the chances of that increase immensely once Google publishes it.
In my case, yes, but my pipeline is closed. Processes run on isolated instances that are terminated without haste as soon as workflow ends. Even if uncaught fatal errors occur, janitor scripts run to ensure instances are terminated on a fast schedule. This isn't something running on my personal device with random content that was provided by unknown someone on the interwebs.
So while this might be a high security risk because it possibly could allow RCE, the real-world risk is very low.
Sure but how.
Let's say that FFMPEG has a 10 CVE where a very easy stream can cause it to RCE. So what?
We are talking about software commonly for end users deployed to encode their own media. Something that rarely comes in untrusted forms. For an exploit to happen, you need to have a situation where an attacker gets out a exploited media file which people commonly transcode via FFMPEG. Not an easy task.
This sure does matter to the likes of google assuming they are using ffmpeg for their backend processing. It doesn't matter at all for just about anyone else.
You might as well tell me that `tar` has a CVE. That's great, but I don't generally go around tarring or untarring files I don't trust.
AIUI, (lib)ffmpeg is used by practically everything that does anything with video, including such definitely-security-sensitive things as Chrome, which people use to play untrusted content all the time.
Then maybe the Google chrome devs should submit a PR to ffmpeg.
Sure. And fund them.
hmm, didn't realize chrome was using ffmpeg in the background. That definitely makes it more dangerous than I supposed.
Looks like firefox does the same.
Firefox has moved some parsers to Rust: https://github.com/mozilla/mp4parse-rust
Firefox also does a lot of media decoding in a separate process.
Ffmpeg is a versatile toolkit used in lot of different places.
I would be shocked if any company working with user generated video from the likes of zoom or TikTok or YouTube to small apps all over which do not have it in their pipeline somewhere.
Upload a video to YouTube or Vimeo. They almost certainly run it through ffmpeg.
ffmpeg is also megabytes of parsing code, whereas tar is barely a parser.
It would be surprising to find memory corruption in tar in 2025, but not in ffmpeg.
If you use a trillion dollar AI to probe open source code in ways that no hacker could, you're kind of unearthing the vulnerabilities yourself if you disclose them.
> My takeaway from the article was not that the report was a problem, but a change in approach from Google that they’d disclose publicly after X days, regardless of if the project had a chance to fix it.
That is not an accurate description? Project Zero was using a 90 day disclosure policy from the start, so for over a decade.
What changed[0] in 2025 is that they disclose earlier than 90 days that there is an issue, but not what the issue is. And actually, from [1] it does not look like that trial policy was applied to ffmpeg.
> To me its okay to “demand” from a for profit company (eg google) to fix an issue fast. Because they have ressources. But to “demand” that an oss project fix something with a certain (possibly tight) timeframe.. well I’m sure you better than me, that that’s not who volunteering works
You clearly know that no actual demands or even requests for a fix were made, hence the scare quotes. But given you know it, why call it a "demand"?
[0] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2025/07/reporting-tra..., discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44724287
[1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/p/reporting-transpare...
When you publicize a vulnerability you know someone doesn't have the capacity to fix according to the requested timeline, you are simultaneously increasing the visibility of the vulnerability and name-calling the maintainers. All of this increases the pressure on the maintainers, and it's fair to call that a "demand" (quotes-included). Note that we are talking about humans who will only have their motivation dwindle: it's easy to say that they should be thick-skinned and ignore issues they can't objectively fix in a timely manner, but it's demoralizing to be called out like that when everyone knows you can't do it, and you are generally doing your best.
It's similar to someone cooking a meal for you, and you go on and complain about every little thing that could have been better instead of at least saying "thank you"!
Here, Google is doing the responsible work of reporting vulnerabilities. But any company productizing ffmpeg usage (Google included) should sponsor a security team to resolve issues in high profile projects like these too.
Sure, the problem is that Google is a behemoth and their internal org structure does not cater to this scenario, but this is what the complaint is about: make your internal teams do the right thing by both reporting, but also helping fix the issue with hands-on work. Who'd argue against halving their vulnerability finding budget and using the other half to fund a security team that fixes highest priority vulnerabilities instead?
> When you publicize a vulnerability you know someone doesn't have the capacity to fix according to the requested timeline
My understanding is that the bug in question was fixed about 100 times faster than Project Zero's standard disclosure timeline. I don't know what vulnerability report your scenario is referring to, but it certainly is not this one.
> and name-calling the maintainers
Except Google did not "name-call the maintainers" or anything even remotely resembling that. You just made it up, just like GP made up the the "demands". It's pretty telling that all these supposed misdeeds are just total fabrications.
The fact that details of the issue _will_ be disclosed publicly is an implicit threat. Sure it's not an explicit threat, but it's definitely an implicit threat. So the demand, too, is implicit: fix this before we disclose publicly, or else your vulnerability will be public knowledge.
That is standard practice. It is considered irresponsible to not publicly disclose any vulnerability.
The X days is a concession to the developers that the public disclosure will be delayed to give them an opportunity to address the issue.
> That is standard practice.
It's standard practice for commercially-sponsored software, and it doesn't necessarily fit volunteer maintained software. You can't have the same expectations.
Vulnerabilities should be publicly disclosed. Both closed and open source software are scrutinized by the good and the bad people; sitting on vulnerabilities isn't good.
Consumers of closed source software have a pretty reasonable expectation that the creator will fix it in a timely manner. They paid money, and the (generally) the creator shouldn't put the customer in a nasty place because of errors.
Consumers of open source software should have zero expectation that someone else will fix security issues. Individuals should understand this; it's part of the deal for us using software for free. Organizations that are making money off of the work of others should have the opposite of an expectation that any vulns are fixed. If they have or should have any concern about vulnerabilities in open source software, then they need to contribute to fixing the issue somehow. Could be submitting patches, paying a contractor or vendor to submit patches, paying a maintainer to submit patches, or contributing in some other way that betters the project. The contribution they pick needs to work well with the volunteers, because some of the ones I listed would absolutely be rejected by some projects -- but not by others.
The issue is that an org like Google, with its absolute mass of technical and financial resources, went looking for security vulnerabilities in open source software with the pretense of helping. But if Google (or whoever) doesn't finish the job, then they're being a piece of shit to volunteers. The rest of the job is reviewing the vulns by hand and figuring out patches that can be accepted with absolutely minimal friction.
To your point, the beginning of the expectation should be that vulns are disclosed, since otherwise we have known insecure software. The rest of the expectation is that you don't get to pretend to do a nice thing while _knowing_ that you're dumping more work on volunteers that you profit from.
In general, wasting the time of volunteers that you're benefiting from is rude.
Specifically, organizations profiting off of volunteer work and wasting their time makes them an extractive piece of shit.
Stop being a piece of shit, Google.
The entire conflict here is that norms about what's considered responsible were developed in a different context, where vulnerability reports were generated at a much lower rate and dedicated CVE-searching teams were much less common. FFmpeg says this was "AI generated bug reports on an obscure 1990s hobby codec"; if that's accurate (I have no reason to doubt it, just no time to go check), I tend to agree that it doesn't make sense to apply the standards that were developed for vulnerabilities like "malicious PNG file crashes the computer when loaded".
I think the discussion on what standard practice should be does need to be had. This seems to be throwing blame at people following the current standard.
If the obscure coded is not included by default or cannot be triggered by any means other than being explicitly asked for, then it would be reasonable to tag it Won't Fix. If it can be triggered by other means, such as auto file type detection on a renamed file, then it doesn't matter how obscure the feature is, the exploit would affect all.
What is the alternative to a time limited embargo. I don't particularly like the idea of groups of people having exploits that they have known about for ages that haven't been publicly disclosed. That is the kind of information that finds itself in the wrong hands.
Of course companies should financially support the developers of the software they depend upon. Many do this for OSS in the form of having a paid employee that works on the project.
Specifically, FFMPEG seems to have a problem that much of their limitation of resources comes from them alienating contributors. This isn't isolated to just this bug report.
It is accurate. This is a codec that was added for archival and digital preservation purposes. It’s like adding a Unicode block for some obscure 4000 year old dead language that we have a scant half dozen examples of writing.
Here's the question:
Why is Google deliberately running an AI process to find these bugs if they're just going to dump them all on the FFmpeg team to fix?
They have the option to pay someone to fix them.
They also have the option to not spend resources finding the bugs in the first place.
If they think these are so damn important to find that it's worth devoting those resources to, then they can damn well pay for fixing them too.
Or they can shut the hell up and let FFmpeg do its thing in the way that has kept it one of the https://xkcd.com/2347/ pieces of everyone's infrastructure for over 2 decades.
Many people are already developing and fixing FFmpeg.
How many people are actively looking for bugs? Google, and then the other guys that don't share their findings, but perhaps sell them to the highest bidder. Seems like Google is doing some good work by just picking big, popular open source projects and seeing if they have bugs, even if they don't intend to fix them. And I doubt Google was actually using the Lucas Arts video format their latest findings were about.
However, in my mind the discussion whether Google should be developing FFmpeg (beyond the codec support mentioned elsewhere in the thread) or other OSS projects is completely separate from whether they should be finding bugs in them. I believe most everyone would agree they should. They are helping OSS in other ways though, e.g. https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/google-sponsors-1-million-to-... .
Google is a significant contributor to ffmpeg by way of VP9/AV1/AV2. It's not like it's a gaping maw of open-source abuse, the company generally provides real value to the OSS ecosystem at an even lower level than ffmpeg (which is saying a lot, ffmpeg is pretty in-the-weeds already).
As to why they bother finding these bugs... it's because that's how Google does things. You don't wait for something to break or be exploited, you load your compiler up with santizers and go hunting for bugs.
Yeah this one is kind of trivial, but if the bug-finding infrastructure is already set up it would be even more stupid if Google just sat on it.
Then they can damn well pay for fixing them too.
I would love to see Google contribute here, but I think that's a different issue.
Are the bug reports accurate? If so, then they are contributing just as if I found them and sent a bug report, I'd be contributing. Of course a PR that fixes the bug is much better than just a report, but reports have value, too.
The alternative is to leave it unfound, which is not a better alternative in my opinion. It's still there and potentially exploitable even when unreported.
But FFmpeg does not have the resources to fix these at the speed Google is finding them.
It's just not possible.
So Google is dedicating resources to finding these bugs
and feeding them to bad actors.
Bad actors who might, hypothetically have had the information before, but definitely do once Google publicizes them.
You are talking about an ideal situation; we are talking about a real situation that is happening in the real world right now, wherein the option of Google reports bug > FFmpeg fixes bug simply does not exist at the scale Google is doing it at.
Nobody is demanding anything. Google is just disclosing issues.
This opens up transparency of ffmpeg’s security posture, giving others the chance to fix it themselves, isolate where it’s run or build on entirely new foundations.
All this assuming the reports are in fact pointing to true security issues. Not talking about AI-slop reports.
> But appearance is operative: a security issue is something that I (as the maintainer) would need to fix regardless of who reports it
I think this is the heart of the issue and it boils off all of the unimportant details.
If it's a real, serious issue, you want to know about it and you want to fix it. Regardless of who reports it.
If it's a real, but unimportant issue, you probably at least want to track it, but aren't worried about disclosure. Regardless of who reports it.
If it's invalid, or AI slop, you probably just want to close/ignore it. Regardless of who reports it.
It seems entirely irrelevant who is reporting these issues. As a software project, ultimately you make the judgment call about what bugs you fix and what ones you don't.
But if it's a real, serious issue without an easy resolution, who is the burden on? It's not that the maintainers wouldn't fix bugs if they easily could. FFmpeg is provided "as is"[0], so everyone should be responsible for their side of things. It's not like the maintainers dumped their software on every computer and forced people to use it. Google should be responsible for their own security. I'm not adamant that Google should share the patch with others, but it would hardly be an imposition to Google if they did. And yes, I really do intend that you could replace Google with any party, big or small, commercial or noncommercial. It's painful, but no one has any inherent obligations to provide others with software in most circumstances.
[0] More or less. It seems the actual language is shied from. Is there a meaningful difference?
Well, it's open source and built by volunteers, so nobody is obligated to fix it. If FFmpeg volunteers don't want to fix it or don't have the time/bandwidth to fix it, then they won't fix it. Like any other bug or CVE in any other open source project. The burden doesn't necessarily need to be on anyone.
They aren't obligated to fix CVEs until they're exploited, and then, suddenly, they very much were obligated to fix the CVEs, and their image as FLOSS maintainers and as a project are very much tarnished.
OTOH they could disclose security issues AND send patches to close them.
if you've ever read about codependency, "need" is a relative term.
codependency is when someone accepts too much responsibility, in particular responsibility for someone else or other things out of their control.
the answer is to have a "healthy neutrality".
I feel this comment is far to shallow a take. I would expect that you know better than most of HN, exactly how much a reputation security has as a cost center. Google uses ffmpeg internally, how many millions would they have to spend if they were required to not only create, but maintain ffmpeg themselves? How significant would that cost be at Google's scale?
I dont agree the following framing is accurate, but I can mention it because you've already said the important part (about how this issue exists, and mearly knowing about it doesn't create required work.) But here announcing it, and registering a CVE, Google is starting the clock. By some metrics, it was already running, but the reputational risk clearly was not. This does change priorities, and requires as urgent context switch. neither are free actions, especially not within FOSS.
To me, being someone who believes everyone, individuals and groups, have a responsibility to contribute fairly. I would frame it as Google's behavior gives the appearance weaponizing their cost center externally, given this is something Google could easily fix, but instead they shirked that responsibility to unfunded volunteers.
To be clear, I think Google (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) can and should fund more of the OSS they depend on. But this doesn’t change the fact that vulnerability reports don’t create work per se, they just reveal work that the project can choose to act on or not.
Hopefully, until that changes, more people with influence will keep saying it, and always say it until it stops being true, and important.
So thank you for saying the important thing too! :)
I see you didn't read the article.
The problem isn't Google reporting vulnerabilities. It's Google using AI to find obscure bugs that affect 2 people on the planet, then making a CVE out of it, without putting any effort into fixing it themselves or funding the project. What are the ffmpeg maintainers supposed to do about this? It's a complete waste of everybody's time.
> The latest episode was sparked after a Google AI agent found an especially obscure bug in FFmpeg. How obscure? This “medium impact issue in ffmpeg,” which the FFmpeg developers did patch, is “an issue with decoding LucasArts Smush codec, specifically the first 10-20 frames of Rebel Assault 2, a game from 1995.”
Fully on FFmpeg team side, many companies approach to FOSS is only doing so when it sounds good on their marketing karma, leech otherwise.
Most of them would just pirate in the old days, and most FOSS licences give them clear conscience to behave as always.
Google is, at no cost to FFMPEG:
1) dedicating compute resources to continuously fuzzing the entire project
2) dedicating engineering resources to validating the results and creating accurate and well-informed bug reports (in this case, a seriously underestimated security issue)
3) additionally for codecs that Google likely does not even internally use or compile, purely for the greater good of FFMPEG's user base
Needless to say, while I agree Google has a penny to spare to fund FFMPEG, and should (although they already contribute), I do not agree with funding this maintainer.
Google is:
- choosing to do this of their own volition
- are effectively just using their resources to throw bug reports over the wall unprompted.
- benefiting from the bugs getting fixed, but not contributing to them.
Then they can surely also provide a pull request for said CVE.
They could, but there is really no requirement on them to do so. The security flaw was discovered by Google, but it was not created by them.
Equally there is no requirement on ffmpeg to fix these CVEs nor any other.
And, of course, there is no requirement on end-users to run software from projects which do not consider untrusted-input-validation bugs to be high priority.
> And, of course, there is no requirement on end-users to run software from projects which do not consider untrusted-input-validation bugs to be high priority.
What's this even saying?
Then they're free to fork it and never use the upstream again.
Where do you draw the line? Do you want Google to just not inspect any projects that it can't fully commit to maintaining?
Providing a real CVE is a contribution, not a burden. The ffmpeg folks can ignore it, since by all indications it's pretty minor.
Personally, I want the $3.5 Trillion company to do more. So the line should be somewhere else.
What is the mission of Project Zero? Is it to build a vulnerability database, or is it to fix vulnerabilities?
If it's to fix vulnerabilities, it seems within reason to expect a patch. If the reason Google isn't sending a patch is because they truly think the maintainers can fix it better, then that seems fair. But if Google isn't sending a patch because fixing vulns "doesn't scale" then that's some pretty weak sauce.
Maybe part of the solution is creating a separate low priority queue for bug reports from groups that could fix it but chose not to.
If you are deliberately shipping insecure software, you should stop doing that. In ffmpeg's case, that means either patching the bug, or disabling the codec. They refused to do the latter because they were proud of being able to support an obscure codec. That puts the onus on them to fix the bug in it.
To build on that - if it "doesn't scale" for one of the wealthiest companies in the world, it certainly doesn't scale for a volunteer project...
> Providing a real CVE is a contribution, not a burden.
Isn't a real CVE (like any bug report) both a contribution and a burden?
> Providing a real CVE is a contribution, not a burden. The ffmpeg folks can ignore it, since by all indications it's pretty minor.
Re-read the article. There's CVEs and then there's CVEs. This is the former, and they're shoving tons of those down the throats of unpaid volunteers while contributing nothing back.
What Google's effectively doing is like a food safety inspection company going to the local food bank to get the food that they operate their corporate cafeteria on just to save a buck, then calling the health department on a monthly basis to report any and all health violations they think they might have seen, while contributing nothing of help back to the food bank.
This is why many have warned against things like MIT licence. Yes, it gives you source code and does easily get incorporated into a lot of projects but it comes at the cost of potential abuse.
Yes, GPL 3 is a lot ideologically but it was trying to limit excessive leeching.
Now that I have opened the flood gates of a 20 year old debate, time to walk away.
Google Project Zero just looks for security issues in popular open source packages, regardless of if Google itself even uses those packages or not.
So I'm not sure what GPLv3 really has to do with it in this case, if it under was a "No billion dollar company allowed" non-free-but-source-available license, this same thing would have happened if the project was popular enough for Project Zero to have looked at it for security issues.
The difference is that Google does use it, though. They use it heavily. All of us in the video industry do - Google, Amazon, Disney, Sony, Viacom, or whoever. Companies you may have never heard of build it into their solutions that are used by big networks and other streaming services, too.
AGPL, with no CLA that lets the owners relicense. Then we'll see if the using corporation fully believes in open source.
There's a reason Google turned into year 2000 Microsoft "it's viral!" re. the AGPL. They're less able to ignore the intent of the license and lock away their changes.
A bunch of people who make era-defining software for free. A labor of love.
Another bunch of people who make era-defining software where they extract everything they can. From customers, transactionally. From the first bunch, pure extraction (slavery, anyone?).
Irrespective of what Google does, security research is still useful for all of us.
They could adopt a more flexible policy for FOSS though.
Or they could contribute solutions to said bugs? Its not like they would distract that much from their bottom line
Exactly. The call-out is not "please stop doing security research". It is, "if you have a lot of money to spend on security research, please spend some of it on discovering the bugs, and some on fixing them (or paying us to fix them), instead of all of it on discovering bugs too fast for us to fix them in time".
Google is a major contributor to open-source video, to the point where it would not be viable without them.
Are the contributions in the room with us now?
I don’t feel like the ffmpeg devs are unimpressed for no reason.
Is it? I’ve gotten nothing but headaches from these automated CVE-seeking teams.
You got lower chances of getting hacked by a random file on the internet. At Project Zero level they're also not CVE seeking - it doesn't even matter at that scale, it's not an independent trying to become known.
It's as useful as brute forcing one of your neighbor's 100 online passwords every day and writing it on the door of a random supermarket.
It's hard to find an easier good vs evil distinction than between Google and literally anybody else.
Microsoft ♥ Linux?
Vim vs. Emacs
Facebook?
Probably a tie!
> era-defining software for free
chill, nobody knows what ffmpeg is
I get the idea of publicly disclosing security issues to large well funded companies that need to be incentivized to fix them. But I think open source has a good argument that in terms of risk reward tradeoff, publicly disclosing these for small resource constrained open source project probably creates a lot more risk than reward.
In addition to your point, it seems obvious that disclosure policy for FOSS should be “when patch available” and not static X days. The security issue should certainly be disclosed - when its responsible to do so.
Now, if Google or whoever really feels like fixing fast is so important, then they could very well contribute by submitting a patch along with their issue report.
Then everybody wins.
> it seems obvious that disclosure policy for FOSS should be “when patch available” and not static X days
This is very far from obvious. If google doesn't feel like prioritising a critical issue, it remains irresponsible not to warn other users of the same library.
If that’s the case why give the OSS project any time to fix at all before public disclosure? They should just publish immediately, no? Warn other users asap.
Why do you think it has to be all or nothing? They are both reasonable concerns. That's why reasonable disclosure windows are usually short but not zero.
Unless the maintainers are incompetent or uncooperative this does not feel like a good strategy. It is a good strategy on Google's side because it is easier for them to manage
Part of the problem is that many of the issues are not really critical, no?
> ...then they could very well contribute by submitting a patch along with their issue report.
I don't want to discourage anyone from submitting patches, but that does not necessarily remove all (or even the bulk of) the work from the maintainers. As someone who has received numerous patches to multimedia libraries from security researchers, they still need review, they often have to be rewritten, and most importantly, the issue must be understood by someone with the appropriate domain knowledge and context to know if the patch merely papers over the symptoms or resolves the underlying issue, whether the solution breaks anything else, and whether or not there might be more, similar issues lurking. It is hard for someone not deeply involved in the project to do all of those things.
> publicly disclosing these for small resource constrained open source project probably creates a lot more risk than reward.
You can never be sure that you're the only one in the world that has discovered or will discover a vulnerability, especially if the vulnerability can be found by an LLM. If you keep a vulnerability a secret, then you're leaving open a known opportunity for criminals and spying governments to find a zero day, maybe even a decade from now.
For this one in particular: AFAIK, since the codec is enabled by default, anyone who processes a maliciously crafted .mp4 file with ffmpeg is vulnerable. Being an open-source project, ffmpeg has no obligation to provide me secure software or to patch known vulnerabilities. But publicly disclosing those vulnerabilities means that I can take steps to protect myself (such as disabling this obscure niche codec that I'm literally never going to use), without any pressure on ffmpeg to do any work at all. The fact that ffmpeg commits themselves to fixing known vulnerabilities is commendable, and I appreciate them for that, but they're the ones volunteering to do that -- they don't owe it to anyone. Open-source maintainers always have the right to ignore a bug report; it's not an obligation to do work unless they make it one.
Vulnerability research is itself a form of contribution to open source -- a highly specialized and much more expensive form of contribution than contributing code. FFmpeg has a point that companies should be better about funding and contributing to open-source projects that they rely on, but telling security researchers that their highly valuable contribution is not welcome because it's not enough is absurd, and is itself an example of making ridiculous demands for free work from a volunteer in the open-source community. It sends the message that white-hat security research is not welcome, which is a deterrent to future researchers from ethically finding and disclosing vulnerabilities in the future.
As an FFmpeg user, I am better off in a world where Google disclosed this vulnerability -- regardless of whether they, FFmpeg, or anyone else wrote a patch -- because a vulnerability I know about is less dangerous than one I don't know about.
> publicly disclosing these for small resource constrained open source project probably creates a lot more risk than reward.
Not publicly disclosing it also carries risk. Library users get wrong impression that library has no vulnerabilities, while numerous bugs are reported but don't appear due to FOSS policy.
You are missing the tiny little fact that apparently a large portion of infosec people are of the opinion that insecure software must not exist. At any cost. No shades of gray.
"They could shut down three product lines with an email"
If you (Amazon, in this case) can put it that way, it seems like throwing them 10 or 20 thousand a year would simply be a good insurance policy! Any benefits you might get in goodwill and influence are a bonus.
How do you think Jeff got a 500 million dollars yacht? Not by writing checks.
But on a more serious note, it is crazy that between Google and Amazon they can not fund them with 50k each per year, so that they can pay people to work on this.
Specially Google, with Youtube, they can very easily pay them more. 100k~200k easily.
What's wild is the importance and impact of the work/tool. And for google and Amazon, $50k-$100k/yr isn't even a single engineer salary to them ...
And they get the tool + community good will, all for a rounding error on any part of their budgets...
Exactly.
That is why I said easily 100~200k. It will be a rounding error for them.
It is actually crazy that Google is not already hiring the main dev to work on ffmpeg with all the use they give it on Youtube.
I also wonder if it is maybe used by Netflix also.
> I also wonder if it is maybe used by Netflix also.
They do and it is.
https://netflixtechblog.com/the-making-of-ves-the-cosmos-mic...
https://netflixtechblog.com/for-your-eyes-only-improving-net...
It is really sad that none of Netflix or Google had hired a couple of devs to work full time on ffmpeg.
I'd be amazed if any of the FAANG's isn't putting real money through ffmpeg somewhere.
So yeah it'd be nice if they put some real money (to ffmpeg - wouldn't be their coffee allowance to any of them) into it.
Almost everything that touches video at some point uses it.
Double funny considering new-grads who may polish up some UI features or rewrite components for the 10th time will get paid 200-400K TC at these same companies. Evidently these companies value something other than straight labor.
Yeah, sadly crazy.
If I had built up 500 million in a savings account to buy a yacht, giving 50k of that to FFmpeg devs would put off my ability to buy a yacht by nearly a whole day.
Boltzmann brain-wise it clearly doesn't make sense to wait that long.
Cheating on your wife would put off your ability to buy that yacht off by 20 years, and yet here we are.
> How do you think Jeff got a 500 million dollars yacht? Not by writing checks.
A rising tide lifts all yachts. If he had written the check, my instinct tells me, he would have enough for two yachts. Goodwill is an actual line item on 10Q's and 10K's. I don't know why companies think it's worth ignoring.
Here's a thread by Google's head of security that notes the ways they've contributed to FFmpeg over the years:
https://x.com/argvee/status/1986194852669964528
Nice to see coming from Google. Some other current and form Google employees were unfortunately not as professional in their interactions on Twitter in regards to this issue.
Unfortunately, nobody not on Twitter can see anything except the first message, which just appears to be some corporate-deflection-speak.
It’s a trillion dollar company. I’m sure they could find rifle through their couch cushions and find more than enough money and under-utilised devs to contribute finance or patches.
Try xcancel instead: https://xcancel.com/argvee/status/1986194852669964528
What is the point of Google's Project Zero?
I'm not being dismissive. I understand the imperetive of identifying and fixing vulnerabilities. I also understand the detrimental impact that these problems can potentially have on Google.
What I don't understand is the choice to have a public facing project about this. Can anyone shine a light on this?
PR.
And pushing forward the idea that "responsible disclosure" doesn't mean the software creator can just sit on a bug for as long as they want and act superior and indignant when the researcher gives up and publishes anyway because the creator is dragging their ass.
Project Zero's public existence came out of the post-Snowden period where Google was publicly pissed at the NSA/etc for spying on them (e.g. by tapping their fiber links).
A lot of their research involves stuff they personally benefit from if they were secure. ffmpeg, libxml2, various kinds of mobile device firmware, Linux kernels and userspace components, you name it.
Their security team gaining experience on other projects can teach them some more diversity in terms of (malware) approaches and vulnerability classes, which can in turn be used to secure their own software better.
For other projects there's some vanity/reputation to be gained. Having some big names with impressive resumes publicly talk about their work can help attract talent.
Lastly, Google got real upset that the NSA spied on them (without their knowledge, they can't help against warrants of course).
Then again, there's probably also some Silicon Valley bullshit money being thrown around. Makes you wonder why they don't invest a little bit more to pay someone to submit a fix.
I would imagine it's mostly a PR/marketing thing. That way the researchers can point to being part of something other people know about, and Google gets positive PR (though maybe not in this case) for spending resources on making software in general more secure.
you could not imagine and just read sources like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Zero
The vulnerability in question is a Use After Free. Google used AI to find this bug, it would've taken them 3 seconds to fix it.
Burning cash to generate spam bug reports to burden volunteer projects when you have the extra cash to burn to just fix the damn issue leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.
Notably, the vulnerability is also in a part which isn't included by default and nobody uses. I'm not sure that even warrants a CVE? A simple bug report would have probably been fine. If they think this is really a CVE, a bug fix commit would have been warranted.
One problem here is that CVE scoring is basically entirely bugged, something scored 8.7 could be an RCE exploit or a "may be able to waste CPU" issue.
That's the difference between "it may or may not be that there's someone who cares" versus "no one should be running this software anywhere in the general vicinity of untrusted inputs".
> One problem here is that CVE scoring is basically entirely bugged, something scored 8.7 could be an RCE exploit or a "may be able to waste CPU" issue.
+100000
My favorite 8.x or higher CVEs are the ones where you would have to take untrusted user input, bypass all the standard ways to ingest and handle that type of data, and pass it into some internal function of a library. And then the end result is that a regex call becomes more expensive.
You’re right about scoring, at least largely. Let’s not conflate the CVE system and the CVSS system, though. They are related but distinct. CVE is just an identifier system.
It is included in most builds of ffmpeg, for example in most Linux packages or in Windows build linked to on ffmpeg.org that I use. But yeah, it's a very niche format that nobody uses.
AIUI there's no such thing as "really a CVE". A CVE is merely a standardized identifier for a bug so you can call it "CVE-2025-XXXXX" rather than "that use-after-free Google found in ffmpeg with AI." It doesn't imply anything else about the bug, except that it may impact security. The Linux kernel assigns one to every bugfix that may impact security (which is most kernel bugs) to avoid controversy about whether they should be assigned.
It is included by default
Use After Free takes 3 seconds to fix if you defer free until the end of the program. If you have to do something else, or you don't want to leak memory, then it probably takes longer than 3 seconds.
Probably the right solution is to disable this codec. You should have to make a choice to compile with it; although if you're running ffmpeg in a context where security matters, you really should be hand picking the enabled codecs anyway.
Yes - more than a sour taste. This is hideous behavior. It is the polar opposite of everything intelligent engineers have understood regarding free-and-open software for decades.
I don't understand the rational for announcing that a vulnerability in project X was discovered before the patch is released. I read the project zero blogspot announcement but it doesn't make much sense to me. Google claims this is help downsteam users but that feels like a largely non-issue to me.
If you announce a vulnerability (unspecified) is found in a project before the patch is released doesn't that just incentivize bad actors to now direct their efforts at finding a vulnerability in that project?
Maybe for a small project? I think the difference here is rather minimal. Everybody "knows" code often has security bugs so this announcement wouldn't technically be new information. For a large project such as ffmpeg, I doubt there is a lack of effort in finding exploits in ffmpeg given how widely it is used.
I don't see why actors would suddenly reallocate large amounts of effort especially since a patch is now known to be coming for the issue that was found and thus the usefulness of the bug (even if found) is rather limited.
There are some rhetorical slights of hand. If Google does the work to find and report vulnerabilities, great. Nice contribution regardless of who provides it. The OSS developer can ignore it by accepting the consequences that will be. They are not forced to fix it except by themselves.
The many large corporations should be funding these tools they depend on to increase time allocations and thus ability to be responsive but this isn't an either/or. These type of thinking erode the communities of such projects and minds of the contributors.
FWIW I've totally been that developer trapped in that perspective so I empathize, there are simply better mental stances available.
Never work for free. It's a complete market distortion and leads to bad actors taking advantage of you and your work.
Sometimes it's hard: for many kinds of projects, I don't think anyone would use them if they were not open source (or at least source-available). Just like I wouldn't use a proprietary password manager, and I wouldn't use WhatsApp if I had a choice. Rather I use Signal because it's open source.
How to get people to use your app if it's not open source, and therefore not free?
For some projects, it feels better to have some people use it even if you did it for free than to just not do it at all (or do it and keep it in a drawer), right?
I am wondering, I haven't found a solution. Until now I've been open sourcing stuff, and overall I think it has maybe brought more frustration, but on the other hand maybe it has some value as my "portfolio" (though that's not clear).
You can just use the GPL, then it's free, but your labour cannot be so easily profited from by big corps
That's fine. Are they required to work for Google? I mean, they are independent and can decide on their own.
I love the spirit of working for free on a project of passion. But yes it only takes a few bad actors to totally exploit it.
Yep.
They should set up a foundation/LLC if they don't have one already and require a support contract for fixing any bugs in niche codecs. Target the 95%-98% use cases for "free" work. If someone gives them a CVE on something ancient, just note it with an issue tracker and that the problem is currently unsponsored. Have default build flags to omit all the ancient/buggy stuff. If nobody is willing to pay to fix all the ancient crap, then nobody should be using it. But if someone is willing to pay, then it gets fixed.
Is it time for FFmpeg to relicense as AGPL? That'd be fun to witness.
Watch places like Amazon and Google suddenly stop updating and trying to find alternatives.
Like how Apple stopped using up to date the GNU tools in 2008 because of GPL3. That moved showed me then that Apple did not want you to use your computer as your computer.
Well, to continue that timeline. "Big Tech" freezes their version to the last gpl'ed version, and each commences their own (non-trivial effort) to make their own version (assuming the last gpl'ed version was not feature-complete for all their future uses).
And of course, they won't share with each other. So another driver would be fear of a slight competitive disadvantage vs other-big-tech-monstrosity having a better version.
Now, in this scenario, some tech CEO, somewhere has this brilliant bright spark.
"Hey, instead of dumping all these manhours & resources into DIYing it, with no guarantee that we still won't be left behind - why don't we just throw 100k at the original oss project. We'll milk the publicity, and ... we won't have to do the work, and ... my competitors won't be able to use it"
I quite like this scenario.
I think this would be hard. It also makes not a whole lot of sense IMO.
People need to think about what licence they want to use for a project.
It'll just get forked (see terraform)
Terraform didn't get licensed as AGPL, just some weird proprietary license.
It'll still cause Google and many others to panic, but weird and custom licenses are even worse for attracting business than open source ones.
We're well past the point that any serious security team should be able to submit a fix along with a bug report.
Does Google seriously not have a whole team of people who help maintain ffmpeg?
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AFFmpeg%2FFFmpeg+google.co...
Yes. But they don’t upstream. Why would they?
Great, they can fix the bugs being filed by another part of their company
So would you rather Google have a secure ffmpeg while us plebian individual users continue to have an insecure ffmpeg?
Honestly, I kind of think that ffmpeg should just document that it's not secure and that you're expected to run it in a sandbox if you plan to use it on possibly-malicious input. All the big cloud users and browsers are doing this already, so it would hardly even change anything.
ffmpeg is complaining that security bugs are such a drag that it's driving people away from their hobby/passion projects. Well, if fixing security bugs isn't your passion, why not just say that? Say it's not your priority, and if someone else wants it to be a priority, they can write the patches. Problem solved?
> “The position of the FFmpeg X account is that somehow disclosing vulnerabilities is a bad thing. Google provides more assistance to open source software projects than almost any other organization, and these debates are more likely to drive away potential sponsors than to attract them.”
This position likely to drive away maintainers. Generally the maintainers need these projects less than the big companies that use them. I'm not sure what Google's endgame is
I doubt there's an endgame in mind. It's probably small teams trying to optimize their quarterly KPIs
> FFmpeg X account is that somehow disclosing vulnerabilities is a bad thing
I mean, I follow that account and never got this impression from them at all.
Is it unreasonable to ask that if a massive company funds someone to find a CVE in an open source project, they should also submit a patch? Google is a search company. Seems kind of... evil... to pay your devs to find holes in something with nothing to do with searching, then refuse to pay them to fix the problem they noticed.
I would suggest that FFmpeg spin up a commercial arm that gets support contracts with Google, Amazon, etc, but with a tight leash so that it does not undermine the open source project. Would need clean guidance as to what the commercial arm does and does not.
Probably could pull in millions per year.
While I don't think FFmpeg's response is a great one ("fund us or stop submitting bugs"); I think Google is being pretty shitty here. For a company that prides itself in its engineering prowess and contributions to the OSS community (as they like to remind me all the time) to behave this way is just all around shitty.
Submit the bug AND the patch and be done with it; don't make it someone else's problem when it's an OSS library/tool. A for-profit vendor? Absolutely. But this? Hell naw.
In general it is not good when companies get too much power. See how shopify is eating away the ruby infrastructure right now after RubyCentral panicked when shopify blackmailed the community by taking away funding. Of course it is their money, but the whole ecosystem suddenly submitting to one huge company, really really sucks to no ends. Hobbyists are at the weakest here.
If it just were that simple. The reality is that this is a very slippery slope and you won’t get a support contract just like that with a “tight leash”
Looks like this was a security issue.
I don't consider a security issue to be a "standard bug." I need to look at it, and [maybe] fix it, regardless of who reported it.
But in my projects, I have gotten requests (sometimes, demands) that I change things like the published API (a general-purpose API), to optimize some niche functionality for one user.
I'll usually politely decline these, and respond with an explanation as to why, along with suggestions for them to add it, after the fact.
It’s a security issue for a stream type almost nobody uses. It’s a little like saying your graphics program in 2025 is exploitable by a malformed PCX file, or your music player has a security bug only when playing an Impulse Tracker module.
Sure, triage it. It shouldn’t be publicly disclosed within a week of the report though, because the fix is still a relatively low priority.
Security is adversarial. It doesn't matter whether the users intentionally use the vulnerable codec. What matters is whether an adversary can make the users to use it. Given the codec is compiled in by default on Ubuntu, and given that IIUC the bug would already be triggered by ffmpeg's file format probing, it seems pretty likely that the answer to that is yes.
Yes, security is by definition adversarial. Thanks for the most basic lesson.
How are you getting ffmpeg to process a stream or file type different from the one you’re expecting? Most use cases of ffmpeg are against known input and known output types. If you’re just stuffing user-supplied files through your tools, then yes you have a different threat model.
> How are you getting ffmpeg to process a stream or file type different from the one you’re expecting?
... That is how ffmpeg works? With default settings it auto-detects the input codec from the bitstream, and the output codec from the extension. You have to go out of your way to force the input codec and disable the auto-detection, and I don't think most software using ffmpeg as a backend would force the user to manually do it, because users can't be trusted to know those details.
If no one uses the stream type, then not fixing the bug won't hurt.
The people who do use the stream type are at risk, and have been at risk all along. They need to stop using the stream type, or get the bug fixed, or triage the but as not exploitable.
Is it me or the linked article seems to be heavily co-authored by AI. The cadence is very monotonic and dull.
It’s a reproducible use-after-free in a codec that ships by default with most desktop and server distributions.
The recent iOS zero-day (CVE-2025-43300) targeted the rarely used DNG image format. How long before this FFMPEG vulnerability is exploited to compromise legacy devices in the wild, I wonder?
I’m not a fan of this grandstanding for arguably questionable funding. (I surely would not fund those who believe these issues are slop.) I’d like to think most contributors already understand the severity and genuinely care about keeping FFMPEG secure.
Bugs in little-used corners of the project are a massive red flag, that's how some of the most serious OpenSSL bugs have emerged. If the code is in there, and someone can trigger it with a crafted input, then it is as bad as any other bug.
I understand ffmpeg being angry at the workload but this is how it is with large open source projects. Ffmpeg has no obligation to fix any of this. Open source is a gift and is provided as is. If Google demanded a fix I could see this being an issue. As it is right now it just seems like a bad look. If they wanted compensation then they should change the model, there's nothing wrong with that. Google found a bug, they reported it. If it's a valid bug then it's a valid bug end of story. Software owes it to its users to be secure, but again it's up to the maintainers if they also believe that. Maybe this pushes Google to make an alternative, which I'd be excited for.
> Google found a bug
That does not impact their business or their operations in any way whatsoever.
> If it's a valid bug then it's a valid bug end of story.
This isn't a binary. It's why CVEs have a whole sordid scoring system to go along with them.
> Software owes it to its users to be secure
ffmpeg owes me nothing. I haven't paid them a dime.
> That does not impact their business or their operations in any way whatsoever.
I don't know what tools and backends they use exactly, but working purely by statistics, I'm sure some place in Google's massive cloud compute empire is relying on ffmpeg to process data from the internet.
And they're processing old LucasArts codec videos with it? Which is the specific bug report in question.
> ffmpeg owes me nothing. I haven't paid them a dime.
That is true. At the same time Google also does not owe the ffmpeg devs anything either. It applies both ways. The whole "pay us or we won't fix this" makes no sense.
> Google also does not owe the ffmpeg devs anything either.
Then they can stop reporting bugs with their assinine one size fits all "policy." It's unwelcome and unnecessary.
> It applies both ways.
The difference is I do not presume things upon the ffmpeg developers. I just use their software.
> The whole "pay us or we won't fix this" makes no sense.
Pay us or stop reporting obscure bugs in unused codecs found using "AI" scanning, or at least, if you do, then change your disclosure policy for those "bugs." That's the actual argument and is far more reasonable.
>Ffmpeg has no obligation to fix any of this
I read this as nobody wants CVEs open on their product, so you might feel forced to fix them. I find it more understandable if we talk about web frameworks: Wordpress don't want security CVEs open for months or years, or users would be upset they introduce new features while neglecting safety.
I am a nobody, and whenever I found a bug I work extra to attach a fix in the same issue. Google should do the same.
What happens if ffmpeg ignores (after triage) the minor CVEs?
Life goes on.
FFmpeg should just dual license at this point. If you're wanting shit fixed. You pay for it (based on usage) or GTFO. Should solve all of the current issues around this.
You mean, Google reports a bug, and ffmpeg devs say "GTFO"? Let's assume this is a real bug: is that what you would the ffmpeg developers to say to Google?
I absolutely understand the issue that a filthy-rich company tries to leech off of real unpaid humans. I don't understand how that issue leads to "GTFO, we won't fix these bugs". That makes no sense to me.
The Tragedy of the Bazaar.
Amusing. I suppose the intended optional behavior is for Google to fix internally then run the public PR. Less optimal for us normal users since the security issue will be visible publicly in the PR until merging, though it won't affect Google (who will carry the fixed code before disclosure).
why don't they just ignore Goole and work at their own pace?
I am fairly confident that this article is largely AI-generated. More generally, the whole site appears to be heavy on AI slop, e.g.: https://thenewstack.io/how-ai-is-pushing-kubernetes-storage-...
And maybe it's fine to have AI-generated articles that summarize Twitter threads for HN, but this is not a good summarization of the discussion that unfolded in the wake of this complaint. For one, it doesn't mention a reply from Google security, which you would think should be pretty relevant here.
Like the bug report in question... poetic.
Wouldn't they just fork it, fix their own bugs and stop contributing at all?
Forking puts you in another hell as Google. Now you have to pay someone to maintain your fork! Maybe for a project that’s well and fully complete that’s OK. But something like FFmpeg is gonna get updated all the time, as the specs for video codecs are tweaked or released.
Their choice becomes to: - maintain a complex fork, constantly integrating from upstream. - Or pin to some old version and maybe go through a Herculean effort to rebase when something they truly must have merges upstream. - Or genuinely fork it and employ an expert in this highly specific domain to write what will often end up being parallel features and security patches to mainline FFmpeg.
Or, of course, pay someone in doing OSS to fix it in mainline. Which is the beauty of open source; that’s genuinely the least painful option, and also happens to be the one that benefits the community the most.
If you're going to fix the bug, why not in the main project?
Any time I have tried to fix a bug in an open source project I was immediately struck down with abusive attitudes about how I didn't do something exactly the way they wanted it that isn't really documented.
If that's what I have to expect, I'd rather not even interact with them at all.
I don't think this is what typically happens. Many of my bug reports were handled.
For instance, I reported to the xorg-bug tracker that one app behaved oddly when I did --version on it. I was batch-reporting all xorg-applications via a ruby script.
Alan Coopersmith, the elderly hero that he is, fixed this not long after my report. (It was a real bug; granted, a super-small one, but still.)
I could give many more examples here. (I don't remember the exact date but I think I reported this within the last 3 years or so. Unfortunately reporting bugs in xorg-apps is ... a bit archaic. I also stopped reporting bugs to KDE because I hate bugzilla. Github issues spoiled me, they are so easy and convenient to use.)
If you really care, I would suggest helping with documenting how the process should work for others to reference going forward.
I would if people were not abusive to me in the first place, but that attitude just turns me off to the entire project.
That costs cash and the big tech companies are a little short at the moment.
They undoubtedly already maintain a fork of the project, considering that they have a private compression accelerator that nobody else has access to.
Probably what they want to do once the original project burns out
Google internally maintaining a fork that attempts to track upstream has a ongoing cost that increases over time
vs. spamming OSS maintainers with slop reports costs Google nothing
Is there really slop here though? It sounds like the specific case identified was a real use after free in an obscure file format but which is enabled by default.
If it was slop they could complain that it was wasting their time on false or unimportant reports, instead they seem to be complaining that the program reported a legitimate security issue?
Hmmmmmm. I can understand both points but ...
Google is under no obligation to work on FFmpeg.
Google leveraging AI to spam ffmpeg devs with bugs that range from real to obscure to wrongly reported may be annoying. But even then I still don't think Google is to be held accountable for reporting bugs nor is it required to fix bugs. Note: I do think Google should help pay for costs and what not. If they were a good company they would not only report bugs but also have had developers fix the bugs, but they are selfish and greedy, everyone knows that. Even then they are not responsible for bugs in ffmpeg. And IF the bug report is valid, then I also see no problem.
The article also confuses things. For instance:
"Many in the FFmpeg community argue, with reason, that it is unreasonable for a trillion-dollar corporation like Google, which heavily relies on FFmpeg in its products, to shift the workload of fixing vulnerabilities to unpaid volunteers"
How could Google do that? It is not Google's decision. That is up to volunteers. If they refuse to fix bug reports reported from Google then this is fine. But it is THEIR decision, not Google.
"With this policy change, GPZ announces that it has reported an issue on a specific project within a week of discovery, and the security standard 90-day disclosure clock then starts, regardless of whether a patch is available or not."
Well, many opinions here. I think ALL bugs and exploits should be INSTANTLY AND WITHOUT ANY DELAY, be made fully transparent and public. I understand the other side of the medal too, bla bla we need time to fix it bla bla. I totally understand it. Even then I believe the only truthful, honest way to deal with this, is 100% transparency at all times. This includes when there are negative side effects too, such as open holes. I believe in transparency, not in secrecy. There can not be any compromise here IMO.
"Many volunteer open source program maintainers and developers feel this is massively unfair to put them under such pressure when Google has billions to address the problem."
So what? Google reports issues. You can either fix that or not. Either way is a strategy. It is not Google's fault when software can be exploited, unless they wrote the code. Conversely, the bug or flaw would still exist in the code EVEN IF GOOGLE WOULD NOT REPORT IT. So I don't understand this part. I totally understand the issue of Google being greedy, but this here is not solely about Google's greed. This is also how a project deals with (real) issues (if they are not real then you can ask Google why they send out so much spam).
That Google abuses AI to spam down real human beings is evil and shabby. I am all for ending Google on this planet - it does so much evil. But either it is a bug, or not. I don't understand the opinion of ffmpeg devs "because it is Google, we want zero bug reports". That just makes no sense.
"The fundamental problem remains that the FFmpeg team lacks the financial and developer resources to address a flood of AI-created CVEs."
Well, that is more an issue in how to handle Google spamming down people. Sue them in court so that they stop spamming. But if it is a legit bug report, why is that a problem? Are ffmpeg devs concerned about the code quality being bad? If it is about money then even though I think all of Google's assets should be seized and the CEOs that have done so much evil in the last 20 years be put to court, it really is not their responsibility to fix anything written by others. That's just not how software engineering works; it makes no sense. It seems people confuse ethics with responsibilities here. The GPL doesn't mandate code fixing to be done; it mandates that if you publish a derivative etc... of the code, that code has to be published under the same licence and made available to people. That's about it, give or take. It doesn't say corporations or anyone else HAS to fix something.
"On the other hand, security experts are certainly right in thinking that FFmpeg is a critical part of the Internet’s technology framework and that security issues do need to be made public responsibly and addressed."
I am all for that too, but even stricter - all security issues are to be made public instantly, without delay, fully and completely. I went to open source because I got tired of Microsoft. Why would I want to go back to evil? Not being transparent here is no valid excuse IMO.
"The reality is, however, that without more support from the trillion-dollar companies that profit from open source, many woefully underfunded, volunteer-driven critical open-source projects will no longer be maintained at all."
Wait - so it is Google's fault if projects die due to lack of funding? How does that explanation work?
You can choose another licence model. Many choose BSD/MIT. Others choose GPL. And so forth.
"For example, Wellnhofer has said he will no longer maintain libxml2 in December. Libxml2 is a critical library in all web browsers, web servers, LibreOffice and numerous Linux packages. We don’t need any more arguments; we need real support for critical open source programs before we have another major security breach."
Yes, that is a problem - the funding part. I completely agree. I still don't understand the "logic" of trying to force corporations to have to do so when they are not obliged. If you don't want corporations to use your code, specify that in the licence. The GPL does not do that. I am confused about this "debate" because it makes no real sense to me from an objective point of view. The only part that I can understand pisses off real humans is when Google uses AI as a pester-spam attack orgy. Hopefully a court agrees and spits up any company with more than 100 developers into smaller entities the moment they use AI to spam real human beings.
Its a special kind of irony to post AI slop complaining about someone's ai slop that isn't actually ai slop just devs whining about being expected to maintain their code instead of being able to extort the messengers to do the work for them.
If they're not being paid, they're under no obligation to "maintain their code". If you don't like it, don't use ffmpeg.
It's not "whining" to refuse to do unpaid labor for the benefit of someone else - especially when the someone else is as well-resourced as Google.
“How dare ffmpeg be so arrogant! Don’t they know who we are? Fork ffmpeg and kill the project! I grant a budget of 30 million to crush this dissent! Open source projects must know who’s boss! I’ll stomp em like a union!”
…. overheard at a meeting of CEO and CTO at generic evil mega tech corp recently.
They obviously need to be reminded that the only reason Google has to care about FLOSS projects is when they can effectively use them to create an advertising panopticon under the company's complete control.
They probably want to drown you in CVEs to force deprecation on the world and everybody into their system like they do with everything else they touch.
This is dumb. Obscurity doesn’t create security. It’s unfortunate if ffmpeg doesn’t have the money to fix reported bugs but that doesn’t mean they should be ignorant of them. I don’t see any entitlement out of Google either - I expected this article would have a GH issue thread with a whiny YouTube engineer yelling at maintainers.
The first thing you can do is actually read the article. The question is not about the security reports but Google's policy on disclosing the vulnerability after x days. It works for crazy lazy corps. But not for OSS projects.
Agreed that obscurity is not security. However we don't want to make it easy for hackers to get a catalog of vulnerabilities to pick and choose from. I think the issue is public disclosure of vulnerabilities after a deadline. The hobbyists can't just keep up.
Google might be aiming to replace ffmpeg as the world's best media professor. Remember how Jia Tan (under different names) flooded xz with work before stepping up as a maintainer.
Google, through YouTube and YouTube TV, already runs one of the most significant video processing lines of business in the world. If they had any interest in supplanting FFmpeg with their own software stack, they wouldn't need to muck around with CVEs to do so.
Please bro, please, fix our bugs bro, just this one bug bro, last one I swear, you and I will make big money, you are the best bro, I love you bro. -- big tech companies
Just mark CVEs as bugs and get to them when you can. In this case, if Google doesn't like it, then so be it. It'll get fixed eventually. Don't like how long it takes? Pay someone to contribute back. Until then, hurry up and wait.
That’s how you get your open source software removed from distributions and eventually forked.
Forked by people who are quicker at fixing security vulnerabilities than the original maintainers?
Sure, for some definition of “vulnerability.” And only doing that, nothing more.
And that's a problem?
Google is evil.
this is why you should release your opensource project with the license of being free only for individual, not for enterprises.
enterprise must pay.
If it's not free for enterprises then it's not open source, according to the commonly accepted definition.
FFmpeg should stop fixing security bugs reported by Google, MS, Amazon, Meta etc. and instead wait for security patches from them. If FFmpeg maintainers will leave it exposed, those companies will rush to fixing it, because they'd be screwed otherwise. Every single one of them is dependent on FFmpeg exactly as shown in https://xkcd.com/2347/
I understand the problem of corporations leeching off of the community here.
I still fail to see why "ffmpeg is not allowed to fix bugs reported by corporations" is a good strategy. To me this sounds not logical.
Because they are making more money in profit than some mid-sized American cities' economies do in a year while contributing nothing back. If they don't want massive security vulnerabilities in their services using FFmpeg, maybe they need to pony up about .1 seconds' worth of their quarterly earnings to the project either in cash or in manpower.
It's not FFmpeg's problem if someone uses a vulnerability to pwn YouTube, it's Google's problem.
Also, in the article, they mention that Google's using AI to look for bugs and report them, and one of them that it found was a problem in the code that handles the rendering of a few frames of a game from 1995. That sort of slop isn't helping anyone. It's throwing the signal-to-noise ratio of the bug filings way the hell off.
> Many in the FFmpeg community argue, with reason, that it is unreasonable for a trillion-dollar corporation like Google, which heavily relies on FFmpeg in its products, to shift the workload of fixing vulnerabilities to unpaid volunteers.
That's capitalism, they need to quit their whining or move to North Korea. /s The whole point is to maximize value to the shareholders, and the more work they can shove onto unpaid volunteers, the move money they can shove into stock buybacks or dividends.
The system is broken. IMHO, there outta be a law mandating reasonable payments from multi-billion dollar companies to open source software maintainers.
Not too fond of maintainers getting too uppity about this stuff. I get that it can be frustrating to receive bug report after bug report from people who are unwilling or unable to contribute to the code base, or at the very least to donate to the team.
But the way I see it, a bug report is a bug report, no matter how small or big the bug or the team, it should be addressed.
I don’t know, I’m not exactly a pillar of the FOSS community with weight behind my words.
When you already work 40+ hours a week and big companies suddenly start an AI snowblower that shoots a dozen extra hours of work every week at you without doing anything to balance that (like, for instance, also opening PRs with patches that fix the bugs), the relationship starts feeling like being an unpaid employee of their project.
What's the point of just showering these things with bug reports when the same tool (or a similar one) can also apparently fix the problem too?
> it can be frustrating to receive bug report after bug report from people
As the article states, these are AI-generated bug reports. So it's a trillion-dollar company throwing AI slop over the wall and demanding a 90-day turn around from unpaid volunteers.
Do you have evidence of ai slop, or are you just spreading fud? The linked bug was acknowledged as real.
That is completely irrelevant, the gross part is that (if true) they are demanding them to be fixed in a given time. Sounds like the epitome of entitlement to me, to say the least.
No one is demanding anything, the report itself is a 90 day grace period before being publicly published. If the issues are slop then what exactly is your complaint?
google literally tells them it's an ai generated report
That is not the definition of slop.
if it's unwanted then it is
and the ffmpeg maintainers say it's not wanted
so it's slop
It’s a reproducible use-after-free in a codec that ships by default with most desktop and server distributions. It can be leveraged in an exploit chain to compromise a system.
I'm not a Google fan, but if the maintainers are unable to understand that, I welcome a fork.
It’s not bug reports. It’s CVE.
There is a convergence of very annoying trends happening: more and more are garbage found and written using AI and with an impact which is questionable at best, the way CVE are published and classified is idiotic and platform founding vulnerability research like Google are more and more hostile to projects leaving very little time to actually work on fixes before publishing.
This is leading to more and more open source developers throwing the towel.
CVEs aren't caused by bugs?
You could argue that, but I think that a bug is the software failing to do what it was specified, or what it promised to do. If security wasn't promised, it's not a bug.
Which is exactly the case here. This CVE is for a hobby codec written to support digital preservation of a some obscure video files from the 90’s that are used nowhere else. No security was promised.
They are not published in project bug trackers and are managed completely differently so no, personally, I don't view CVE as bug reports. Also, please, don't distrort what I say and omit part of my comment, thank you.
Some of them are not even bugs in the traditional sense of the world but expected behaviours which can lead to unsecure side effects.
It seems like you might misunderstand what CVEs are? They're just identifiers.
This was a bug, which caused an exploitable security vulnerability. The bug was reported to ffmpeg, over their preferred method for being notified about vulnerabilities in the software they maintain. Once ffmpeg fixed the bug, a CVE number was issued for the purpose of tracking (e.g. which versions are vulnerable, which were never vulnerable, which have a fix).
Having a CVE identifier is important because we can't just talk about "the ffmpeg vulnerability" when there have been a dozen this year, each with different attack surfaces. But it really is just an arbitrary number, while the bug is the actual problem.
I'm not misunderstanding anything. CVE involves a third party and it's not just a number. It's a number and an evaluation of severity.
Things which are usually managed inside a project now have a visibility outside of it. You might justify it as you want like the need to have an identifier. It doesn't fundamentally change how that impacts the dynamic.
Also, the discussion is not about a specific bug. It's a general discussion regarding how Google handles disclosure in the general case.
The lowered lead times are because devs have an entitled additude that others fix their code when they discover bugs in it.
The 90 day period is the grace period for the dev, not a demand. If they don't want to fix it then it goes public.
> The lowered lead times are because devs have an entitled additude that others fix their code when they discover bugs in it.
That’s how open source works.
It is super strange to say that who devoted their time and effort and then gives away their work for free is somehow entitled.
If this keeps up, there won't be anyone willing to maintain the software due to burn out.
In today's situation, free software is keeping many companies honest. Losing that kind of leverage would be a loss to the society overall.
And the public disclosure is going to hurt the users which could include defense, banks and other critical institutions.