<https://libera.catirclogs.org/ffmpeg-devel/2024-02-23>

The FFmpeg devs saw the violation, even laughed about how funny it was, then they tweeted, so the initial drama is originally not that big.

They pointed it out to Rockchip; immediately the developers from Rockchip answered (which is quite rare for big companies!):

  Herman Chen: "I apologize... lack of understanding on conflict between Apache and LGPL. We will replace these code in future update. And do more homework on open source license."

  FFmpeg: "Thank you for your message"

If you need something from someone, and they have not done it, you don't send a bomb after 1.5 years of silence. You can send a reminder.

If after these reminders, they don't know how to do, and you want them to do something, you can educate them:

  A) Fork the FFmpeg repo
  B) Move your file to that repo
  C) Create a Makefile that will build a .so with that file only
  D) Link that .so to your project

Takes 10 minutes.

If they refuse to comply, that justifies DMCA. But nothing indicates refusal in the public communications.

About the 1.5 years: silence != patience.

"We gave them time" is not the same as "we gave them a deadline and reminders" or "we communicated and they refused."

Imagine this: you buy me lunch, and I did not pay you back.

  You: "Hey, you owe me 10 USD for lunch."
  Me: "Oh sorry, I misunderstood! I'll pay you back."
  You: "Thanks for your message."

Then... nothing. No Venmo request. No reminder. No "hey, can you get me that 10 USD?"

Two years later, you take me to small claims court for 500 USD. That's not patience. That's setting someone up to fail.

Now, still:

  - Rockchip's code is gone
  - FFmpeg gets nothing back
  - Community loses whatever improvements existed
  - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner

I'm just wondering how it escalated so much ?

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.

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.

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.