Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Following Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government. The Sovereign Tech Fund notes that the FFmpeg project is receiving 157,580 euros for 2024 and 2025.

An announcement on the FFmpeg.org project site notes: "The FFmpeg community is excited to announce that Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has become its first governmental sponsor. Their support will help sustain the [maintenance] of the FFmpeg project, a critical open-source software multimedia component essential to bringing audio and video to billions around the world everyday."

"The Germany Government"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugly, try removing that trailing "y".

Great news!

[dhaen]

FFMPEG continues to be the best and most versatile tool for media conversion.

Re:Great news!

[ShanghaiBill]

If governments spent half as much to improve open source as they pay to Microsoft, we'd all be much better off.

Last year, the U.S. government paid Microsoft $498M. State and local governments spend even more.

Re:

[jonadab]

I don't know, man. I've been using it for certain things until now, but seeing it listed alongside Gnome, PHP, and systemd, makes me question whether I should be using it at all. Is it possible that I have simply failed to *notice* that it's extremely terrible in some obvious way?

Re:

[codebase7]

Is it possible that I have simply failed to *notice* that it's extremely terrible in some obvious way?

Nope, you haven't. That's GStreamer you're thinking of.

Fraunhofer

[bill_mcgonigle]

Back when Fraunhofer GmbH was enforcing MP3 patents against open source (Fedora, et. al.) how would this sort of funding have affected ffmpeg?

Will it in the future?

Re:

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Is Fraunhofer State-owned? Their website is not particularly helpful on that detail. Either way, they probably get their research grants from the same branch of the government as is supporting FFmpeg here, and they would not have been about to bite the hand which feeds them.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Fraunhofer State-owned? Their website is not particularly helpful on that detail. Either way, they probably get their research grants from the same branch of the government as is supporting FFmpeg here, and they would not have been about to bite the hand which feeds them.

Fraunhofer is owned and partly funded by the German Federal Government and the various German states but funds itself to a large extend also through project work for third parties in industry. Or, if you are American, It's a hotbed of evil socialism!!!

Re:

[codebase7]

Or, if you are American, It's a hotbed of evil socialism!!!

God Damn. The fucking socialists are funding U.S. patent infringing technology! What lows will they sink to next!? They should be glad we even allow them to pay us royalties....

As a German and supporter

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

As a German and loyalist to ze Legitimous Government Temporarily Frozen At Ze South Pole I certainly support our vicious secret plans to erect Ze New Reich (ZNR! Jawoll, Hahaha!). Supporting systemd and GNOME, however, seems a bit too extreme.

Obvious take

[JThundley]

ffmpeg really is the best, but why didn't they pick a good desktop environment?

Re:

[codebase7]

a good desktop environment

Well, when you ask for the impossible......