> Ok but who is going to sift through it all to triage the good bits when you're working on something for free?
Its like anything else in open source. Maintainers will do so if they care. Maybe they decide they don't care. That is always their decision to make but there are consequences for the project. Maybe those consequences make sense. Being a maintainer is all about making cost-benefit trade offs.
> Who gives a shit about reputation when you're the only game in town?
Its up to the maintainers whether they care or not. It depends on what they value.
Ultimately if maintainers make decisions that are at odds with what their userbase want, someone eventually forks and people vote with their feet.
Security is a bit different.
Today it's an industry driven by unscrupulous clout-chasers and a commitment to quantity over quality.
There is a difference between going through patches and pull requests vs. the endless stream of LLM-assisted bullshit that has started cluttering security inboxes in the last few years.
Vulnerability researchers don't create the vulnerabilities they report. The vulnerabilities exist whether or not they're reported by "clout chasers".
There is a difference between a proper vulnerability researcher and a clout chaser calling themselves a vulnerability researcher. Research for a start, to assess the problem to see if it is genuine and if so if there are significant mitigating factors (by default or that can be implemented), and checking if it hasn't already been reported, instead of just copypasting some LLM output with minimal review. And to many clout chasers everything they find is a grade A world wrecking highest possible priority "if you don't drop everything else and fix this now you are a kitten murderer and I'm going to release the information to the world in 24 hours" level issue (they know this because they suggested it to an LLM and it told them they were so right).
No there isn't. The vulnerability is either real or it isn't. How you feel about the researchers doesn't enter into it. People angry about vulnerability research have been making this argument since 1992.
> Maintainers will do so if they care.
Caring is only part of the problem. If you are inundated by low quality reports, or many duplicates of what turn out to effectively be the same problem, that you have to sift through to find the useful reports, then by the time you have something actionable you have no time left to take action on it.
The amount of reports coming in, particularly the low/zero quality ones, is apparently growing at a much faster rate than the time volunteers have for dealing with them.
Caring does not magically solve problems without enough people with enough time.
"care" is not a viable metric for prioritising the allocation of a scarce resource.
Yes, and people will sit there and sip tea while waiting for "someone"? For how long?
> Yes, and people will sit there and sip tea while waiting for "someone"? For how long?
Until someone cares enough to do it. This is open source software. When it comes to open source, the golden rule is you either do the things you care about yourself or stfu.
Given the libav fork wasn't all that long ago, it can obviously happen to ffmpeg just as much as it can happen to any other project.