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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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[-] vahtos@programming.dev 266 points 7 months ago

It's so ridiculous that this isn't even brought up:

The Command you provided worked fine. Thank you so much for the help! Really appreciated! We are going to proceed to make a release today and test with customers. Will post the updates here.

Gotta love being a forced beta tester... I mean customer.

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 139 points 7 months ago

That does kind of admit what we all suspected about Microsoft's QA since they fired the whole testing team in 2014.

[-] piskertariot@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

Meanwhile Google has always just forced you to go to Google Groups to log bugs in production software.

[-] infinitepcg@lemmy.world 124 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

If the live version is already broken, there isn't much to lose deploying the fix as soon as possible. Not sure what else they could have done here.

[-] aStonedSanta@lemm.ee 29 points 7 months ago

Yup. Shits fucked. Do what you can. Lol

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 10 points 7 months ago

There are likely other changes made since they released that version to their customers, so the risk is other things in addition to the current thing get broken.

[-] logi@lemmy.world 15 points 7 months ago

There is zero chance that they'll just build from the latest main branch and release that tomorrow. Or that whatever build they make goes directly to general distribution.

They'll make a build from the last release plus this patch and send it to a few customers who have complained. Then they'll think about making a release with this and perhaps other bug fixes.

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 6 points 7 months ago

If the Microsoft person making this request can’t update a command line switch, I seriously doubt they will try to build from source with a patch.

[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 16 points 7 months ago

isn't that what a canary release essentially is?

[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Man, must be rough to be an MS engineer and do work in public. Ignoring the financial aspect, can't say I've never had a similar ticket and resolution.

this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
1065 points (95.9% liked)

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