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
If someone abuses my bug tracker to act like a clown
From what little we know, it looks like they used it correctly
I have every right to decline their support requests
Priority is guidance from the user. The maintainer always has the decision how they’ll respond. You could have said you don’t have time, you could have said it’s on my queue to look at later, you could have said you don’t provide support.
We’re talking about a hypothetical. I’m not the ffmpeg maintainer. The person got help in their thread and everything was courteous. I wouldn’t even be rude about it, I just wouldn’t hold their hand, and I might make a comment about the value of doing some legwork on your own when an update to a core dependency seems to break something. If this kind of behavior is considered sensible for a project manager at MS, then apparently I’m more qualified to manage projects than a lot of people at some of the largest corporations on Earth.
The maintainer always has the decision how they’ll respond.
That is literally the opposite of what you were just saying. You were saying that open source developers can’t even complain when responsible people at gigantic corporations file dumb bug reports against their project.
