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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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[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The maintainer is a human that needs to eat every day, and not just whenever their services are needed. So at least, the sum of money would need to be a few times higher than whatever labour the fix takes.

But then, the maintainer's ability to fix these bugs doesn't come from nowhere. They worked on this project for likely a long time, which would also need to be taken into account when agreeing on a sum.

Further, this would be business to business. And those contracts often include the value that the client gets out of the software. So if Microsoft makes billions from this open source library, then the maintainer's - as a business - should receive a payment that reflects this for the fix.

All that implies that a few thousand is not nearly enough. Maybe 100k and the maintainer would budge.

[–] lysdexic@programming.dev -1 points 7 months ago

The maintainer is a human that needs to eat every day, and not just whenever their services are needed.

That's perfectly fine.

But the maintainer is indeed explicitly making his work available to the public for free and without any expectation of retribution of any kind, isn't it?

And this isn't exactly something new or recent or novel, right? That's been going on for many years.

What changed? Did anything changed at all, even?