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
Cognitive dissonance.
For a lot of people, either they accept “this trillion dollar corporation that controls all my computers, and the programming languages I use, and my code editor, is evil”. Or they accept “this trillion dollar company does lots of good things for me and is good”.
One is easier to accept than the other.