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
Got that’s fucking brutal. This isn’t even asking them to fix a bug, it’s just basic help-desk shit.
I’m sure Microsoft has some good devs that are a net benefit to the open source projects they use, but this is not one of them.
That’s the level of an intern that has never even seen a command. Imagine not being able to literally cat a string with another string, aka. add -data_field first to a command.
Found the guy who created the FFMpeg ticket on LinkedIn. Job title: “Principal software engineer at Microsoft”, saying they are “A detailed, analytical Software Engineer with Eighteen years of experience”. 18 years?! Fuck me dead…
Raymond Chen. Hilariously enough, his best blog posts involve him jumping through hoops for MSFT customers with support contracts.
That, but they couldn’t even insert the advised parameter to the command themselves, instead they had the capacity to basically demand improvement to the documentation, from those “filthy ffmpeg developers”