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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MIT license to make money is bad because of this. You shouldn't make money or ask me for support in first place if you arent sharing earnings bitch. This should be forbidden by law because software is given AS IS.

What, they just asked, they didn't say they were entitled to it.

Maybe OP didn’t share enough context, because this whole thing looks like a big over-reaction on their part.

  • There’s no accusation of misusing the license, so they’re using it properly
  • there’s a bug tracker, which they used for a bug report
  • OP demanded money when there was no expectation of it

So what’s going on here? With the information given, Microsoft did what they should have and OP is acting the huge asshole

I think what set them off was the MSFT guy saying "this is high priority".

The rest of the tweets definitely don't make him appear as less of a self-righteous ass.

This actually made me cringe:

Your weekly reminder that FFmpeg powers all online video - Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Disney+, Netflix etc etc, all run FFmpeg underneath