It's worth noting that if someone can't be contacted, the maintainers aren't out of luck yet. If the contribution is deleted (and then possibly reimplemented later by someone with whom the project _is_ in contact) then the issue is resolved. It can be a lot of work, though, depending on the size and importance of the contribution, and reimplementing the code in a way that doesn't derive from the original submission can be difficult or ambiguous.
GPLv2 requires you to either distribute the source with the binaries, or provide the recipient information on how to obtain the source code. It also states that providing a link to the source code next to the binary download on your website is sufficient. See GPLv2 section 3 for more details.
TikTok have not provided a link to its source code, not are there instructions on their site or within the download package indicating where users can obtain the source code. Therefore, it's a violation.
Paying for a license would be nearly impossible, as the OBS team would need every contributor to sign a CLA to give the OBS team the rights to relicense/dual-license the OBS code base.
OBS uses FFmpeg for media source playback, some audio encoders, and specific video output contexts. Usually FFmpeg isn't used for video encoding, though -- that's handled by either a direct hardware encoder implementation or by a native x264 encoder (i.e. not FFmpeg's x264 implementation). OBS supports FFmpeg output in Advanced mode, but it's by no means the default.
Well, I think it's possible FTL will be gone from OBS by the end of 2021 so I guess they need to figure out what they are doing sooner rather than later. There will probably be a post about it on the OBS Github soon.
You should know the OBS team plans on deprecating FTL since Mixer was the only major player who ever used it, not to mention the fact that the server side of the tech is closed. The FTL implementation in OBS is buggy, and keeping it maintained is not worth the effort for a non-standard transport protocol.
To be frank, it could definitely use help in terms of both engineers and donors. OBS's userbase has grown from roughly 500k daily users at the beginning of March 2020 to more than 1.4 million today (on Windows -- I don't have numbers for Mac or Linux). The project only has one full-time developer, and he's frequently stretched pretty thin between developing major features, reviewing pull requests, reviewing RFCs, and having calls with industry members. Unfortunately the nature of such a complex project (both in terms of functionality and technology) is that it's hard to find people qualified to work on it who aren't already dedicated to some other project. More community contribution from skilled engineers would absolutely be welcome. For example: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-browser/issues/219 and https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink/issues/56
And on the subject of donors, it's tough to be able to appropriately compensate contributors without some amount of stability of income. OBS accepts donations primarily though Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/obsproject), and while there's a good amount in the bank, it's not being replaced as quickly as the project might need in order to properly fund developers at the level it needs to in the long term. A broader donor base would certainly help bring the stability needed to support that sort of effort.
And you make an excellent point with the lockdown. Now's an awkward time to want to raise funds for the project with so many people struggling financially. In fact, it's probably reasonable to say that OBS's usage has increased so much specifically due to the fact that it doesn't require anyone to pay for it, so it's less likely that the people who use it are able to help fund it.
I will say that there are efforts underway to hopefully address some of the systemic shortcomings that the OBS team has in terms of funding and development bandwidth, but things still move slowly when built on the back of a largely-volunteer workforce.
Currently the lead developer (Jim) is the only paid developer, and he's able to work on the program full time thanks to a few large sponsorships. That said, we'd really like to be able to pay more people, as the program has many development needs that could really use attention. More detail about sponsorship/donation opportunities can be found here: https://obsproject.com/contribute
You could probably do it yourself if you wanted, I don't see any reason why not. I suppose the main concern is whether anyone else is already working on it, and if it will be a race. If you want to work on it, I suggest you post saying so, and start working on a design document to post on the RFC page.
Depends. If the bounties are created by the maintainers themselves, funded from something like Open Collective, I think it can be a healthy way to get the community involved and help maintainers get things done that they wouldn't be able to work on themselves. If bounties are only exclusively created and funded by the community, I can see how this could be a problem.