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

  • lysdexic@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Companies hate giving out cash. Even if it’s for software they critically need.

    I think for most cases getting the cash is the easy part, and the hard part is getting all the paperwork in place to validate payments to random external entities. If that was easy, nothing would stop any low-level manager from making cash payments to random users with a GitHub account.