Could there have been other / better moves with sending a reminder.
I think the devs of that Chinese company seemed to immediately acknowledge the attribution.
Now the OSS community loses the OSS code of IloveRockchip, and FFmpeg wins practically nothing, except recognition on a single file (that devs from Rockchip actually publicly acknowledged, though in a clumsy way) but loses in reputation and loses a commercial fork (and potential partner).
How do you partner with someone who has so much contempt for you they ignore the license you've given them and, when called on it, simply ignore you?
They had ample warning and ignored the license. what you're even on about?
[flagged]
The amount of armchair quarterbacking here is wild.
Then waiting to see how they addressed these points and what were the approaches taken and why ?
Here spent time to think and document all the IRC chats, the Twitter thread, the attitude of the SoC manufacturer, etc.
There has to be a backstory to suddenly come after 1.5 years for an issue that could have been solved in 10 minutes.
Then why didn't Rockchip solve it in 10 minutes?
Bad decision and risk/reward calculation for sure. If it's code that is core to your stuff, and it is GPL'd, it's (technically) very tricky to solve.
But here, as FFmpeg is LGPL and we talk about one single file, there is even less work to do in order to fix that.
Yeah, Rockchip seems to have screwed up badly but as per the GitHub DCMA notice:
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1...
> ... the offending repository maintainers were informed of the problem almost 2 years ago ([private]), and did nothing to resolve it. Worse, their last comment ([private]) suggests they do not intend to resolve it at all.
Seems like the reporter gave them a lot of time to fix the problem, then when it because obvious (to them) that it was never going to be fixed they took an appropriate next step.
That's bullshit. The FFmpeg devs were well within their rights to even send a DMCA takedown notice, immediately, without asking nicely first.
This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.
They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.
Yeah. This is like waiting 90 days before releasing a full disclosure on a vulnerability, and then complaining you could have contacted us and given us time, we only had 90 days now. Gaslighting 101. Those 90 days gives all those with a lot if resources and sitting on zero days (such as Cellebrite) time to play for free.
Deadline and reminders? They aren't teachers and Rockchip isn't a student, they are the victims here and Rockchip is the one at fault. Let's stop literally victim blaming them for how they responded.
To be clear: Rockchip is at fault, 100%. I would sue (and obv DMCA) any company who takes my code and refuses to attribute it.
If you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] because they refuse to fix, then that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X), then it's odd.
Maybe spend less time policing how other people are allowed to act, especially when you’re speculating wildly about the presence or content of communications
It's a call to push the devs to freely say what happened in the background, there are many hints at that "I wonder if...?" "What could have happened that it escalated?" "Why there were no public reminders, what happened in the back", etc, etc, nothing much, these questions are deliberately open.
Oh. Being rude and suggesting the devs made (in your opinion) a mistake based on your guess at their actions is not going to be an effective way to get them to elaborate on their legal strategy.
Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.
In the adult world you don't get any warnings when you break the law.
Your original comment had this at the end...
> - Rockchip's code is gone > - FFmpeg gets nothing back > - Community loses whatever improvements existed > - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
The OP deleted that sentence and I don't think it should have be flagged and unseen by others so I have vouched for it. I understand a lot of people disagree with it, and may downvote it but that is different to flagging. ( I have upvoted in just in case )
He offer perspective from a Chinese POV, so I think it is worth people reading it. ( Not that I agree with it in any shape or form )
The sentence is actually just in the comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46396107
You are right, and the FFmpeg devs are also 100% right and I perfectly understand that.
In fact I like the idea to push the big corps and strongly enforce devs' rights.
I think earlier enforcement would have been beneficial here, just that dropping a bomb after 1 year of silence and no reminder (and we still don't know if that was the case), is a bit unpredictable, so I wanted to raise that question
There hasn't been a year of silence. Multiple people from the community have continued bugging Rockchip to address the matter in a public issue on the now-gone Github repo. The idea of a potential DMCA claim was also brought.
All they could say was "we are too busy with the other 1000s chips we have, we will delay this indefinitely".
Ridiculous.
We are not going to loose anything. If it’s got a strong enough community then someone will publish a fork with the problem fixed
If you have to hound them to stop breaking the law they were already an adversary and the easiest way to comply would be to simply follow the license in which case everyone wins