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THE ORIGINAL CONVERSATION

Jean-Baptiste Kempf on open-source code quality, maintenance and secure builds

Lex Fridman Podcast · · 4:18:22

In this Lex Fridman interview with Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya about FFmpeg and VLC, Kempf discusses evaluating contributions by code quality, the maintenance burden on a small core team, and VideoLAN’s offline build and signing practices.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf on open-source code quality, maintenance and secure builds
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
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Content updated:

Translations are for reading; original excerpts remain the evidence.

At a glance

Key moments3

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0:00 (opens in a new tab)
Open-source software

Code quality matters more than contributor credentials

Original excerpt

The important thing is, is your code good? We care about excellent code. We don’t care who you are. Like maybe you’re a dog. I don’t care, right? I don’t care where you come from. I need to look at your code.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf·
Context

FFmpeg is probably one of the biggest CPU users in the world. Everything we’ve just said in the past couple of minutes, every sentence is someone’s lifetime’s work. There are books about every sentence. So the level of complexity in many cases is inordinate.

52:30 (opens in a new tab)
Open-source software

A small FFmpeg core team bears the maintenance burden

Original excerpt

one thousand contributors in the timeline and just ten staying, it’s a one percent chance that someone comes and stays. One percent. So you will have change of job, change of wives, you have children, you have accidents in life. You’re going to change jobs, whatever. You’re not going to come back. It’s most likely. So we are the ones going to maintain your code.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf·
Context

He’s very harsh, but what people don’t see is usually when he’s harsh, it’s to people who are maintainers of part of the kernel, right? So they know him, right? So he’s not very harsh like that to everyone. The thing is, what he created in his room is basically powering every server online, right? Even at Microsoft’s cloud called Azure, I’m quite sure seventy, eighty percent of the servers are running Linux. All your Android phones are running Linux. What he did with the power of open source, sure, is amazing. And yes, the quality of the Linux kernel is very high, and yes, it’s difficult, but we cannot compromise on that. We cannot compromise on quality because in the end—and you have to understand that—the core community of VLC is five people. But we should also mention that there is some spiciness, some harshness to the language that’s sometimes used when you’re keeping this high bar of excellence. Is there something to say to that?

3:53:19 (opens in a new tab)
Open-source software

VideoLAN compiles offline and uses double signatures

Original excerpt

There is no code that gets into VLC that we don’t control, and the way we compile VLC, you would call me completely paranoid. Like, we compile on boxes that are offline, where we start by compiling the compiler. We do everything offline on places that have never been connected to the internet. We— The way we do signing, there is double signature.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf·
Context

And what’s the definition of compromise? Like allowing a government to do a backdoor- I move to, I don’t know, Cayman Islands, and I change the domain name, and I start again, right? Like, VLC is a tool. It’s a tool that is going to help people doing things. We are not a platform. And for patents, well, I’m sorry, but most of the patents… Like, you shouldn’t be able to patent math and matrices. Like, this is wrong.

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