As title.
I use GStreamer since years now and I feel that this project is really too good to be true.
How GStreamer can give us such a jewel for free?
How can GStreamer pay such great developers if we use it for free?
Are there companies that sponsors the project?
Just curiosity, nothing more 
Hi,
opensource is the magic word.
Opensource means that programmers do it for pleasure, they love what they do. They love to partecipate to create a great project. For sure also in commercial companies there are a lot of people that loves their job but they are not free as opensource programmers are. Their target is also different: opensource’s target is the creation of something that can improve the world, that can help humanity’s progress.
In the middle ages also science worked in the same way. They worked to stop illnesses, to improve the world. The first modern university,for example, born in Italy, it was a medicine school in Salerno and Bologna. They wanted to put in practice Jesus words: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.But when did we do all this?
Everything you did to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did to me.”
I hope that science will be free again to do the best for all us and future generations.
Best regards
Alex
I understand that open source is the magic world but there are a lot of developers that are “centricular employees”.
How do you pay their salary?
Hi
Thanks for the message.
What you are getting “for free” is the result of hours (or rather man-years or even man-centuries) people have spent collectively with a common goal : a framework to make it easier to deal with multimedia (usually to create an application/idea you had). And the best way to do that was doing it collectively.
It is true a lot of us started doing it “for fun”, having an itch to scratch, wanting to write a video editor (it’s a trap, you’ll end up like Wim and myself tackling low-level stuff), wanting to understand how multimedia works, … and not wanting to reinvent the wheel. But also a lot of companies also wanted to avoid reinventing the wheel because they wanted to develop a product where the core focus is not how multimedia is handled (GStreamer), but how it is used (their product).
Whether hobbyist or business, I believe what has made GStreamer thrive is the underlying principles of free software, and especially the LGPL. The code we wrote (and the time we spend on documentation, chat, reviewing issues/mr) is given to you for free with a lot of liberties … but if you improve on this code and ship a product using it, you have to give back to the community the improvements you made. I don’t think I would have ever come this far, or even persevered participating in GStreamer if there wasn’t this principle of “I’m giving people this code/time because I know I will get back something in return (feedback, improvements, more ideas, …)”. i.e. We are a community and not a “dump that code out there, use it as you want” loose collection of people. That fundamental social perspective is what made GStreamer work, maybe even more than the technical aspect.
So, how about the money, we live in the real world, right ? Throughout the years, a lot of companies have trusted this model and contributed back to GStreamer and quite a few have even become active members of this community. They have helped bring their knowledge, feedback, expertise into the collective pool. Whether directly (because they had the expertise in-house) or via the various consulting companies you see contribute to GStreamer.
Does everybody who use GStreamer contribute back ? No, absolutely not. But I believe those who did got a lot more in return. And it’s always a blast to see more and more people (hobbyist or professionals) use GStreamer and share their feedback.
Here’s to another 25 years of GStreamer 
Thank you for your job, for your time!
Best regards,
A. Giuliani
I’ve only recently started using gstreamer, and it looks like it’s a really great library, especially under Linux.
Another important aspect is that if you as a user see a bug, you report it.
This is also a step towards making software better and better.