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
Companies like Microsoft should really have a fund for fixing open source projects - it’s breeds good will, reduces the cost of development, and they in turn get software for much less cost than if they did it themselves.
Like - we are using project X and I want to request a bug fix, they go - estimate your effort in shirt sizes or points or some shit for you to do it.
A bean counter looks at their scale that directly converts effort to cost they have under the table, and they give you a budget to offer the dev of the software as part of the fix request
I think they wanted something more like $10k/year, which seems pretty cheap when you compare it to the price of one employee.