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Microsoft opens a "high priority" bug ticket in ffmpeg, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers (trac.ffmpeg.org)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Sibbo@sopuli.xyz to c/programming@programming.dev

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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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[–] 42Firehawk@lemmynsfw.com 113 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Hilariously the issue was just a setting change in the update, that you can easily change via a command option. They saw thing didn't work, and didn't read the change log at all before asking to pay a one time fee to guarantee it be maintained for them.

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 30 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So ffmpeg gets a few thousand dollars for such a simple answer/solution? Sounds good to me?

[–] 42Firehawk@lemmynsfw.com 75 points 7 months ago

The problem is that Microsoft wants to pay that for a permanent "never maintain in a way that breaks caption decoding in any default behaviour we use" with that one time payment.

Its a quick fix on Microsofts end to change a quick flag in ffmpeg. It's also quick on their end to maintain a fork that only changes the default. One time payments for maintenance make open source projects like ffmpeg subject to fail.

[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago

Yes, they should have read the update notes. But I don't see much in the way of documentation regarding the data_field cli option in their documentation even now.