[ekidd]

> they shouldn't be its maintainers.

I mean, yes, the ffmpeg maintainers are very likely to decide this on their own, abandoning the project entirely. This is already happening for quite a few core open source projects that are used by multiple billion-dollar companies and deployed to billions of users.

A lot of the projects probably should be retired and rewritten in safer system languages. But rewriting all of the widely-used projects suffering from these issues would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

The alternative is that maybe some of the billion-dollar companies start making lists of all the software they ship to billions of users, and hire some paid maintainers through the Linux or Apache Foundations.

[chii]

> abandoning the project entirely

that is a good outcome, because then the people dependent on such a project would find it plausible to pay a new set of maintainers.

[kragen]

We'll see. Video codec experts won't materialize out of thin air just because there's money.