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

Sibbo@sopuli.xyz to Programming@programming.dev – 1046 points –
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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There was no bug to fix, the PM didn't keep up with developments in an (apparently) core dependency and was passing outdated arguments to ffmpeg.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.

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

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.