9mo ago

Microsoft opens a "high priority" bug ticket in ffmpeg, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers

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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220 comments

I don't get why they don't propose a fix themselves.
- 99% morons, that's why...
- Why spend money when you can bully people?
  
  I see what you're saying, but no one is being bullied here.
  
  Not really but Microsoft being pushy without wanting to pay for a support contract is kind of on par for that shit company.
  
  Microsoft also makes like half of the languages and dev tooling that every piece of software depends on. Microsoft is certainly problematic but I would not consider their support or attitude towards open source projects in general to be.
  
  half
  You're kidding, right? Especially on open source?
  Embrace, extend, extinguish. THAT is Microsoft, so if tomorrow that company burns to the ground, the world will be a little better.
  
  Lmfao, it's honestly hard to tell whether people on Lemmy are genuine old heads still stuck in the past or just young ones blindly repeating what they've heard that sounds edgy.
  There hasn't been an example of Microsoft EEEing something in 20 years. You could literally be in college right now and the past time Microsoft even tried to sabotage an open source project would be before you were born.
  To casual tech enthusiasts who want to fit in with die hard open source enthusiasts it's cool to hate Microsoft, for professional software developers who have seen what say, JavaScript was like before and after Microsoft started working on it, we have a bit of a more nuanced view of them.
- Lack of faith in their own talent?
- Probably cause the software engineers writing a high level chat app in TypeScript don't have the skills or knowledge to fix a bug in a C++ video decoder.

220 comments