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Microsoft opens a "high priority" bug ticket in ffmpeg, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers (trac.ffmpeg.org)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Microsoft employee:

Hi, This is a high priority ticket and the FFmpeg version is currently used in a highly visible product in Microsoft. We have customers experience issues with Caption during Teams Live Event. Please help

Maintainer's comment on twitter:

After politely requesting a support contract from Microsoft for long term maintenance, they offered a one-time payment of a few thousand dollars instead.

This is unacceptable.

And further:

The lesson from the xz fiasco is that investments in maintenance and sustainability are unsexy and probably won't get a middle manager their promotion but pay off a thousandfold over many years.

But try selling that to a bean counter

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

To be fair, I'm sure this is a lone developer at Microsoft, not Microsoft as a company. A lot of this still absolutely applies, but it's not Microsoft as a company making an official decision to go ask the FFMEPG guys for free shit.

It'd be nice if the guy had an avenue to go to leadership, tell them about the issue, and just ask them to actually fund the guys to work on it.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

They did offer a few thousand as a one time purchase so i doubt this is a lone developer.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Companies like Microsoft should really have a fund for fixing open source projects - it's breeds good will, reduces the cost of development, and they in turn get software for much less cost than if they did it themselves.

Like - we are using project X and I want to request a bug fix, they go - estimate your effort in shirt sizes or points or some shit for you to do it.

A bean counter looks at their scale that directly converts effort to cost they have under the table, and they give you a budget to offer the dev of the software as part of the fix request

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I think they wanted something more like $10k/year, which seems pretty cheap when you compare it to the price of one employee.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

But it seems that it’s actually built in to some part of their software so Microsoft is still responsible as a whole.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Fair! But if someone works in tech, this kind of etiquette is something worth learning