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
The point is that a multi billion dollar company, known for squashing and sabotaging open source projects, wants a bug fixed quickly. The open source software that they make big money from has an issue and they COULD just sponsor it, get a support contract, whatever, but instead they want priority because reasons?
If it was a random user, then whatever. The entire point is that this is not a simple random user.