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 €157,580.00 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.”
Exciting news and great continuing to see the significant investments across many open-source projects being made by the Sovereign Tech Fund.
Source: Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg – Phoronix
Ffmpeg is a hugely important tool used for manipulating video and sound files in all kinds of ways. It is used under the hood by all kinds of projects. It’s really encouraging to see governments funding this kind of stuff, especially considering the problems open source developers are running into. There should be a lot more of this and a lot less of businesses ‘funding’ open source projects and then forking them into closed source versions (here’s looking at you, Amazon).
Robin Edgar
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