Ok but who is going to sift through it all to triage the good bits when you're working on something for free?
> Ffmpeg devs are free not to care, but then they cant complain when they start to get a bad reputation
Who gives a shit about reputation when you're the only game in town?
There is nothing out there that even attempts to approximate an ffmpeg clone. They are the Swiss army knife of media encoding and all complainers have produced are plastic sporks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The advent of LLMs has made this a hundred times worse. Both because it makes it easier for most people to create reports that sound good (and so are more effort to dissect) and because people who didn't have to work hard to get any amount of competence are usually more entitled and more rude (the stakes are even lower for them).
It is economically no longer a good idea to run a bug bounty program at all. I honestly question whether or not even having a direct input for such things makes any sense anymore. The volume is becoming so great you need a classical spam filter to plow through it. But that won't work, because they all sound reasonable.