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
There’s two parts here. First, one of the wealthiest companies in the world just told them that fixing the code is extremely important to them. So the developer probably believes that they can squeeze more money out of this deal. Two, the developer is suddenly responsible for code in a very widely used product. Any bugs that they introduce are going to affect a lot of people. If it’s this important to Microsoft that bugs be resolved quickly, the developer will need to be able to devote more time to this project. More time spent here means less time making money elsewhere. So of Microsoft wants to ensure immediate resolution to their issues, they need to pay this person to be on call.