Microsoft opens a "high priority" bug ticket in ffmpeg, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers
trac.ffmpeg.org
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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Tasteless! MSFT can have their armies of skilled people do this instead of leeching off FOSS contributions. It’s just not an acceptable move from a profit-driven entity to expect free labor, regardless of the FOSS philosophy of the project!
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.
They did offer a few thousand as a one time purchase so i doubt this is a lone developer.
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
I think they wanted something more like $10k/year, which seems pretty cheap when you compare it to the price of one employee.
But it seems that it’s actually built in to some part of their software so Microsoft is still responsible as a whole.
Fair! But if someone works in tech, this kind of etiquette is something worth learning
They offered a few thousand dollars, but not a long term contract.
That’s fine, but long term maintenance is the main pain for FOSS projects. I am not sure what’s the right protocol here, though. In general, maybe FOSS projects should start a subscription service for big time companies like MSFT. Why not?
Companies like Suse, redhat, gruntworks, etc etc all offer stuff like that. There is a clear model here. I think libs get little live because contracts are a lot if work so the smaller the contract the less it makes sense (to the people writing contracts).
Maybe open source coop that sells support contracts for libs in bulk deals in the same a farmer coop sells bulk crops from famers all around an area.
I'm honestly in favor of something like that, but when people are saying SSPL isn't FOSS because it supposedly discriminates against different classes of users, we won't get the momentum for people to view any sort of "FOSS except for commercial" license as valid or worth using.
Some such licenses exist (not saying they're good or anything). PolyForm Noncommercial and PolyForm Small Business are two examples https://polyformproject.org/licenses/