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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 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/programming

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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] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 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 8 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.