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

  • 42Firehawk@lemmynsfw.com
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    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.