Programming

17661 readers

246 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

1067

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

222 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

There was no bug to fix, the PM didn't keep up with developments in an (apparently) core dependency and was passing outdated arguments to ffmpeg. The fix was for the project to update how it was passing flags to ffmpeg. They'd rather spend the time opening a ticket on ffmpeg's bugtracker and spend thousands of company money begging ffmpeg to help them, when MS is a massive corporation, is apparently relying on ffmpeg, yet has hitherto established no support relationship and also has developed no internal expertise on ffmpeg

They easily could have opened up the code and looked around to find the problem, or checked the changelog since an update broke it, or just rolled back to the last-known working version until they had time to figure it out, instead they just dumped it on ffmpeg's doorstep like their hair was on fire. FFMPEG's development model is explicitly that they iterate quickly and there are very likely to be poorly documented breaking changes between versions. It's not one you pull a new version of casually.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Ok, this time I read the full ticket, so ….

They used the software in compliance with provided license
opened a bug report on the provided system
cooperate with the maintainer to diagnose
then when it was user error, they asked where they should have found the doc?
then some asshole pasted a huge graphic in the bug report demanding money

I love to hate on Microsoft too, but I only see one asshole here

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

The point is that a multi billion dollar company, known for squashing and sabotaging open source projects, wants a bug fixed quickly. The open source software that they make big money from has an issue and they COULD just sponsor it, get a support contract, whatever, but instead they want priority because reasons?

If it was a random user, then whatever. The entire point is that this is not a simple random user.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks was too lazy to read the actual issue - exactly what i expected