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
It’s not that Microsoft isn’t allowed to use ffmpeg, it’s that they start demanding quick service. When you use an open source product, you get what you get. You can politely ask for a fix somewhere, you can fix it yourself and make a merge request, but being amongst the biggest corporations in the world, you don’t go without a support contract yet make demands and then maybe toss in a few thousand dollars, that is just insulting.
Had this been a non Foss product, MS would have a support contract. This just shows Microsofts typical greed.
Where did they demand?
I’m not sure what experience you have in maintaining any somewhat popular FLOSS project, but as I said in other posts the way random users demand features and fixes in these circles already became a meme in FLOSS circles. We’re talking about insults and belligerent attitudes towards whole projects in abstract and maintainers in particular, to the point maintainers end up burning out and quitting.
Knowing this, complaining that a particular request was described as high-priority as if this was unacceptable, fully knowing that this doesn’t even represent a remark that’s out of line given the baseline, is something that makes no sense at all. It sounds as an lame attempt to be outraged about something.