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

  • @[email protected]
    35•1 month ago

    Imagine if you gave away some old clothes to some Charity and they called you and said “Some of the socks have holes in them and we need you to come over here and fix those holes ASAP because we want to sell them in our used clothes store”. What would be your reaction to that?

    The expectation of payment is not for the software (which MS already has and is already using, free of charge, same as everybody else), it’s for getting priority in bugfix and maintenance work, or in other words, it’s for dictating other people’s work rather than merelly getting the product of work they, of their own choice and in their own timings, did and gave away for free.

    Free software is a social relationship, not a business relationship: the users get what they get because somebody chose to put their own time into it and is giving it out for free. Such relationship does not entitle the recipients of the goodwill of others to make demands on their time, especially if said recipients are actually profiting from what those other people gave away. If they want the right to get to use other people’s time as they see fit, then they have to get into a business relationship and that’s only going to happen in business terms that both parties are willing to have.

    Further, nobody is stopping MS from using their own programmers to fix that problem themselves.

    • @[email protected]English
      -23•1 month ago

      Imagine if you gave away some old clothes to some Charity and they called you and said “Some of the socks have holes in them and we need you to come over here and fix those holes ASAP because we want to sell them in our used clothes store”. What would be your reaction to that?

      I think your hypothetical scenario doesn’t match the issue being discussed in a few key aspects.

      You’re giving old clothes with no expectation of return. Why then get pissed because someone is using your clothes without paying you for them?

      Then,if you make it your point to put up a system for everyone to file tickets pointing problems with the clothes you’re giving away, why are you whining that the system is being used as it was designed to be used?

      It’s perfectly fine if you feel the need to prioritize your work based on your criteria alone, and anyone else’s input is at most a suggestion. That’s what everyone expects of it, too. But don’t throw a tantrum when someone uses your work precisely as you told the world to use it.