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by amiga386 484 days ago
> However, in 2023, MPEG LA was acquired by Via-LA, and everything changed. When I reached out to Via-LA in late 2024 to confirm FFmpegKit’s position under their terms, I received no response.

The real reason. Greedy bastards, and the risk of your business being set on fire by greedy bastards, even if they don't have a right to anything - they can still threaten to waste your time and money and offer a shakedown instead.

I've never used FFmpegKit (I've mostly just used the command-line, or indirectly via yt-dlp and Handbrake) but just hearing about it now, the maintainer sounds like an awesome person who really went above and beyond to support free software, so hooray for them! I bet it was useful for thousands of other projects, and those people are all grateful too.
1 comments
cm2187 484 days ago
From the article, Via-LA just didn't respond to the author, that doesn't really say anything about their position. It's a bit premature to call them greedy bastard. The author is doing this out of an abundance of caution, not in response of a legal action.
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bayindirh 484 days ago
Considering that MPEG-LA and in turn Via-LA only provides non-commercial licenses with the hardware which can encode/decode the codecs under their umbrella, and (Via-LA) stays silent on a matter so they can snipe people from the distance, they are the de-facto greedy ones.

ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254

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amiga386 483 days ago
If I write to the Mafia asking to confirm they won't burn my store to the ground, they won't write back saying "no".

They're not obligated to respond, and they enjoy the fear, uncertainty and doubt their non-response creates.

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iambateman 483 days ago
If I ask my city if they will enforce their explicitly written zoning policy against renting a single room to a tenant, they won’t write back. But they also have no intention of enforcing that policy.

It doesn’t make them evil…just bureaucratic.

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sbarre 483 days ago
Your city doesn't exist primarily to extract profits though, does it?
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lmm 483 days ago
If the city bureaucracy doesn't exist primarily to provide continued employment to people of a certain class who can't or won't do something more productive, it's doing a pretty good impression of it. The purpose of a system is what it does and all that.
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