If a company had money to “bribe” why wouldn’t they just pay off the original creators for a license change? Or make their own version of the gpl codebase?

It’s not the 90s anymore, the majority of new software is released under permissive licensing. And companies are more willing to upstream their code, regardless of license.

Firefox and chromium (two out of three big web engines) use ffmpeg so billions use every day, for sure. In chrome though they disabled the obscure codecs.

I thought this was something that they already patched. Good on Google this time

I think the Twitter account is also fake. He said he isn’t on any social media

https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/social-media-news/linux-founder-linus-torvalds-thinks-facebook-twitter-and-instagram-are-a-disease.html

The bots are custom made, because there is no nofollow attribute. 90% of the spam will basically disappear if and when its implemented (from experience running web blogs)

Maybe nofollow and ugc attrib on outgoing links could help?