6 ms·

Microsoft offered FFmpeg small one-time payment instead of support contract

83 points by notRobot 3y ago

beanjuiceII 3y ago
they offered money, ffmpeg refused it.. ffmpeg does not offer support so why would microsoft offer a support contract. a big nothing burger tweet
- summerlight 3y ago
  You're confused about what is the right order. Technical supports usually come after the corresponding support contract, not inverse.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    It can come the other way, of course, with one or more zeroes added to the end of the price tag. For a couple of million, I don't think ffmpeg would've rejected their offer. There's something to be said for taking this lump sum and asking for it every time a Microsoft employee files another bug. It'd be like a support contract without the obligations, which includes the freedom to let issues linger on the bottom of the issue tracker. That would create some perverse incentives and probably wouldn't help the project out much, but it may convince Microsoft to go for the cheaper support contract instead. What I personally don't understand is why Microsoft didn't use any of their programmers to write a patch and submit it. Perhaps the task was daunting enough that their own programmers couldn't do it within their set budget?
    - happymellon 3y ago
      > What I personally don't understand is why Microsoft didn't use any of their programmers to write a patch and submit it You have actually used a Microsoft product? They probably couldn't figure out how to add dependencies to SharePoint and gave up.
      - kbenson 3y ago
        Boring, repetitive take. Microsoft is a large company with some crap products and some really cool stuff. Their work to bring SQL Server to Linux[1] seemed very cool. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13206438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13206438
        happymellon 3y ago
        Nearly a decade ago they partially ported their database to Linux? I guess that completely invalidates everything else they've done since
        kbenson 3y ago
        It's a technology company with over 200,000 employees, that's in just about every industry, sometimes with bad software, sometimes with good. Are you actually going to double down on your 2024 comment equivalent of "Herr derr, Micro$hit is bad" when there's much more interesting and nuanced takes to be had, which would be much more useful to and entertaining to everyone involved in the discussion?
        happymellon 3y ago
        You are the one defending Teams. You did actually read the Tweet right? You do know that this is Microsoft Teams demanding immediate response support via the FFMPEG support forum. That this is a multi-billion dollar corporation who have used an Open Source piece of software for one of their most highly visible corporate products after they declined to pay for support. Amazon don't get this because when they use free software they employ people to push back fixes upstream. Google don't get this because they don't demand that the community fixes bugs on their timescale. If they did, they would get the same response.
        kafkabenchmark 3y ago
        I'm not sure this is as big of a "gotcha" as you think. You do realise that MS SQL Server is their rebranded Sybase SQL Server, which before Microsoft purchased, ran on Unix? So the big innovation was to take Unix software, port it to Windows, and then spend time porting it to Linux?
    - rjzzleep 3y ago
      It's funny you should say that, because Microsoft does it the other way round. And they have the absolute worse premium support ever. I remember a slide from the CIO conference a few years ago that made the rounds saying that the rule for Microsoft Premium support is you don't buy Microsoft Premium support. It's obviously a joke, since without those contracts Microsoft is pretty unlikely to ever respond to your mail.
    - stingraycharles 3y ago
      To the last point you made: probably big corp stuff. This developer for Microsoft Teams is on a team which doesn’t have the necessary skills to understand ffmpeg, and cannot tap into any other resources in the organization because of politics / budgets / whatever. They’re still faced with bugs in their project, and as such, do the most pragmatic thing: try to work with the developers of the OSS project in question to get it resolved.
    - shermantanktop 3y ago
      Have you looked a ffmpeg’s source? Have you looked at the man page?? This is not some one-trick utility with a 100-line function at the center of it. It would be hubris for a newbie to the codebase to attempt a nontrivial change as a way to avoid getting support. (Ironically, turns out that reading man page was the thing that Microsoft didn’t do, and no ffmpeg coding was required)
- austhrow743 3y ago
  The tweet is ffmpeg saying they offered Microsoft a support contract. I'm not sure you could have a better source contradicting that. Still a nothing burger tweet.
alberth 3y ago
Let me get this right … FFmpeg open sourced their software for all to use without having to pay for it. This was a choice they made. Then on their own web site, they only accept 1-time donations and state “If you find FFmpeg useful, you are welcome to contribute by donating.” [0] Then someone comes along to donate (and play by the rules they’ve set), and they publicly complain about it? Some Advice: if you want to monetize Fortune 500 use, don’t open source it. Or at least, create a strategy that allows you to monetize it (like what Sidekiq has done). [0] https://ffmpeg.org/download.html https://ffmpeg.org/download.html
- joedwin 3y ago
  Microsoft Requested Urgent support on a bug from FFmpeg.
  - alberth 3y ago
    Just because someone asks you to do something (who you have no obligation to help), doesn’t mean you must help. And if FFmpeg was so passionate to get a support contract from Microsoft, that should have been a requirement first before they provided the support. Once again, FFmpeg set their own rules. First with free software and now with free support. Life lesson: Don’t provide free software and free support, and then complain about your own doing.
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    They can simply force all users to file bugs with technical details OR get a support contract for general questions and troubleshooting, which would be the best way of forcing companies into contracts.
    - kierank 3y ago
      (author of the post on X) We cannot tell volunteers to not do something (i.e help Microsoft) in the same way we cannot tell volunteers to do something.
  - Zetobal 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oefrha 3y ago
This is an example of why Twitter links are terrible for figuring out what’s going on. At first glance, Microsoft is donating a few thousand dollars, cool, better than nothing, why not? You have to scroll up (and you have to be logged in to do that) to read the previous tweet to realize they’re demanding “high priority” fix because FFmpeg is used in a “highly visible” Microsoft product (Teams) and an FFmpeg issue is causing issue for their customers.
- kbenson 3y ago
  Demanding? Seems like the person submitting the ticket wanted to talk to someone quickly. Without context the person submitting the issue m ight be noting that it's high priority on their side, so they're feeling pressure, in case that might convince someone to talk to them sooner to figure out the appropriate action to take. Not everyone at MS is going to be a developer with enough knowledge to take tha appropriate action. To me this sort of reads like some hapless newbie at MS caught between their managers and the OSS developers, neither of which are getting the full context, and so are having wildly different expectations of what's appropriate. That said, I don' think it's inappropriate to offer some money. There's many situations where that can make sense to all parties involved. For example, it could be that MS was choosing whether to sick their own resources on it and submit a patch or ask the developer in case they would appreciate the chance at some money for what would undoubtedly be easier for them to do than for some developer at MS that's unfamiliar with ffmpeg. That doesn't mean it makes sense for MS to immediately go to a support contract though, when honestly setting that up and negotiating it and getting it approved by management may itself far outstrip the time they have to get the problem fixed. That doesn't also preclude them opting for a support contract after the fact once the problem is fixed and they reassess their exposure by using ffmpeg in the way they do (why are they pushing out included libs that aren't tested?). Calling them out publicly is probably a good way to get them to decide not to give that support contract though, since you've proven you're unprofessional enough to immediately publish once side of a grievance very publicly, and who wants to deal with worrying about that in the future?
  - oefrha 3y ago
    “This is a high priority ticket” — in the context of an FFmpeg ticket it seems quite clear what “this” is: the FFmpeg ticket. When you communicate as employee of company X, you represent company X, especially when you specifically namedrop company X. No one cares or should care whether it’s a “hapless newbie” doing the communication. Maybe do better training next time. (The specific engineer is actually quite senior if you look up their name, but that’s beside the point.) In addition, they didn’t “immediately publish once [sic] side of a grievance”, the ticket happened quite a long time ago and was only brought up in light of the xz fiasco.
politelemon 3y ago
I don't see where they offered payment in that thread. This is low quality ragebait.
- planetsulu 3y ago
  About offering a payment is here: https://twitter.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178805704888726 https://twitter.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178805704888726
M95D 3y ago
A bit unrelated to this news: I clicked the link to the bug tracker and saw this reply from MS team: "We are going to proceed to make a release today and test with customers." They test their releases directly with customers? What happened to the alpha and beta testers?
- theshrike79 3y ago
  > What happened to the alpha and beta testers? They're called customers =) Of course they won't release it 100%, they'll do a limited rollout and see if something blows up.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  That is the point of canary release process and it is not as bad as it sounds. I know bean counters, software managers and IT people love to use the word critical for nearly everything, but in the grand, and even medium scheme of things, there is nothing critical in Teams. We aren't talking medical equipment, nuclear stuff or some simulation platform to make sure buildings are sounds and will not collapse.
- trympet 3y ago
  Microsoft eats its own dog food and refers to internal “alpha testers” as customers.
HeavyStorm 3y ago
Disclaimer: I work for msft, but I don't represent them in this matter nor I have any insider information. I just read the posts. The bug post is clearly from a developer who I assume is a bit desperate to fix an issue. He certainly isn't representing Microsoft in the bug post - I assume he was naive and thought mentioning Microsoft would bring attention to the issue (it did, the wrong kind). There's no information about the "offer" Microsoft made, but I'll take a guess: we have an initiative that selects through voting open source projects that are awarded a one time payment of "a few thousand dollars". Unless evidenced otherwise by ffmpeg, I would assume this is where that money is coming from. A company as big as Microsoft has lots of procedures and bureaucracies involved in contracting with third parties, and I don't think they were aiming for a support contract in this instance, or, at best, someone looking for help found a simpler way of paying out, instead of going through the proper channels. People tend to see big companies as an entity of their own, instead of a bunch of people running different processes around. I think the lesson here is that we need to educate our developers on how to communicate with open source projects and third parties.
- kierank 3y ago
  Hi, this is a high priority ticket and FFmpeg is used in highly visible products all over the world. We have developers working for free while trillion dollar corporations want urgent help from volunteers. Please help, /s
- internetter 3y ago
  > People tend to see big companies as an entity of their own, instead of a bunch of people running different processes around. This is for the better. By invoking the microsoft card, they became representatives of the company. If you are using your company status to gain something, you are acting on behalf of said company. Look up respondeat superior
- int_19h 3y ago
  I also work for MSFT, and this story is frankly embarrassing. It's not even this particular case, it's that this is a pattern, both Microsoft-wide and industry-wide. The initiative you describe is part of the problem - it wouldn't even be relevant in this situation if we as a company properly funded the dependencies that we use. As you say, Microsoft has lots of procedures and bureaucracies, yet we have streamlined the use of F/OSS significantly compared to 12 years ago (I know; I was there when you had to have multiple meetings with lawyers every time you pulled in an open source dependency). Why didn't we do the same for supporting those dependencies? Why is it not part of the same workflow, even? Surely if something is a critical component in a shipping product, it needs to be sponsored appropriately automatically?
poisonborz 3y ago
One developer from Microsoft Teams opened a badly worded bug ticket = "Microsoft is making demands"?
- onion2k 3y ago
  Asking for help is not the same as making demands. To make a demand there has to be a downside for the person who you want to do something.
- badgersnake 3y ago
  I’m amazed anyone would admit they work on Teams in public. It’s so incredibly bad.
  - Mashimo 3y ago
    Works fine here.
- internetter 3y ago
  Yes. Respondeat superior

83 points by notRobot 3y ago

they offered money, ffmpeg refused it.. ffmpeg does not offer support so why would microsoft offer a support contract. a big nothing burger tweet

summerlight 3y ago
You're confused about what is the right order. Technical supports usually come after the corresponding support contract, not inverse.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  It can come the other way, of course, with one or more zeroes added to the end of the price tag. For a couple of million, I don't think ffmpeg would've rejected their offer. There's something to be said for taking this lump sum and asking for it every time a Microsoft employee files another bug. It'd be like a support contract without the obligations, which includes the freedom to let issues linger on the bottom of the issue tracker. That would create some perverse incentives and probably wouldn't help the project out much, but it may convince Microsoft to go for the cheaper support contract instead. What I personally don't understand is why Microsoft didn't use any of their programmers to write a patch and submit it. Perhaps the task was daunting enough that their own programmers couldn't do it within their set budget?
  - happymellon 3y ago
    > What I personally don't understand is why Microsoft didn't use any of their programmers to write a patch and submit it You have actually used a Microsoft product? They probably couldn't figure out how to add dependencies to SharePoint and gave up.
    - kbenson 3y ago
      Boring, repetitive take. Microsoft is a large company with some crap products and some really cool stuff. Their work to bring SQL Server to Linux[1] seemed very cool. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13206438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13206438
      - happymellon 3y ago
        Nearly a decade ago they partially ported their database to Linux? I guess that completely invalidates everything else they've done since
        kbenson 3y ago
        It's a technology company with over 200,000 employees, that's in just about every industry, sometimes with bad software, sometimes with good. Are you actually going to double down on your 2024 comment equivalent of "Herr derr, Micro$hit is bad" when there's much more interesting and nuanced takes to be had, which would be much more useful to and entertaining to everyone involved in the discussion?
        happymellon 3y ago
        You are the one defending Teams. You did actually read the Tweet right? You do know that this is Microsoft Teams demanding immediate response support via the FFMPEG support forum. That this is a multi-billion dollar corporation who have used an Open Source piece of software for one of their most highly visible corporate products after they declined to pay for support. Amazon don't get this because when they use free software they employ people to push back fixes upstream. Google don't get this because they don't demand that the community fixes bugs on their timescale. If they did, they would get the same response.
      - kafkabenchmark 3y ago
        I'm not sure this is as big of a "gotcha" as you think. You do realise that MS SQL Server is their rebranded Sybase SQL Server, which before Microsoft purchased, ran on Unix? So the big innovation was to take Unix software, port it to Windows, and then spend time porting it to Linux?
  - rjzzleep 3y ago
    It's funny you should say that, because Microsoft does it the other way round. And they have the absolute worse premium support ever. I remember a slide from the CIO conference a few years ago that made the rounds saying that the rule for Microsoft Premium support is you don't buy Microsoft Premium support. It's obviously a joke, since without those contracts Microsoft is pretty unlikely to ever respond to your mail.
  - stingraycharles 3y ago
    To the last point you made: probably big corp stuff. This developer for Microsoft Teams is on a team which doesn’t have the necessary skills to understand ffmpeg, and cannot tap into any other resources in the organization because of politics / budgets / whatever. They’re still faced with bugs in their project, and as such, do the most pragmatic thing: try to work with the developers of the OSS project in question to get it resolved.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    Have you looked a ffmpeg’s source? Have you looked at the man page?? This is not some one-trick utility with a 100-line function at the center of it. It would be hubris for a newbie to the codebase to attempt a nontrivial change as a way to avoid getting support. (Ironically, turns out that reading man page was the thing that Microsoft didn’t do, and no ffmpeg coding was required)
austhrow743 3y ago
The tweet is ffmpeg saying they offered Microsoft a support contract. I'm not sure you could have a better source contradicting that. Still a nothing burger tweet.

alberth 3y ago

Let me get this right … FFmpeg open sourced their software for all to use without having to pay for it. This was a choice they made. Then on their own web site, they only accept 1-time donations and state “If you find FFmpeg useful, you are welcome to contribute by donating.” [0] Then someone comes along to donate (and play by the rules they’ve set), and they publicly complain about it? Some Advice: if you want to monetize Fortune 500 use, don’t open source it. Or at least, create a strategy that allows you to monetize it (like what Sidekiq has done). [0] https://ffmpeg.org/download.html https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

joedwin 3y ago
Microsoft Requested Urgent support on a bug from FFmpeg.
- alberth 3y ago
  Just because someone asks you to do something (who you have no obligation to help), doesn’t mean you must help. And if FFmpeg was so passionate to get a support contract from Microsoft, that should have been a requirement first before they provided the support. Once again, FFmpeg set their own rules. First with free software and now with free support. Life lesson: Don’t provide free software and free support, and then complain about your own doing.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  They can simply force all users to file bugs with technical details OR get a support contract for general questions and troubleshooting, which would be the best way of forcing companies into contracts.
  - kierank 3y ago
    (author of the post on X) We cannot tell volunteers to not do something (i.e help Microsoft) in the same way we cannot tell volunteers to do something.
- Zetobal 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oefrha 3y ago

This is an example of why Twitter links are terrible for figuring out what’s going on. At first glance, Microsoft is donating a few thousand dollars, cool, better than nothing, why not? You have to scroll up (and you have to be logged in to do that) to read the previous tweet to realize they’re demanding “high priority” fix because FFmpeg is used in a “highly visible” Microsoft product (Teams) and an FFmpeg issue is causing issue for their customers.

kbenson 3y ago
Demanding? Seems like the person submitting the ticket wanted to talk to someone quickly. Without context the person submitting the issue m ight be noting that it's high priority on their side, so they're feeling pressure, in case that might convince someone to talk to them sooner to figure out the appropriate action to take. Not everyone at MS is going to be a developer with enough knowledge to take tha appropriate action. To me this sort of reads like some hapless newbie at MS caught between their managers and the OSS developers, neither of which are getting the full context, and so are having wildly different expectations of what's appropriate. That said, I don' think it's inappropriate to offer some money. There's many situations where that can make sense to all parties involved. For example, it could be that MS was choosing whether to sick their own resources on it and submit a patch or ask the developer in case they would appreciate the chance at some money for what would undoubtedly be easier for them to do than for some developer at MS that's unfamiliar with ffmpeg. That doesn't mean it makes sense for MS to immediately go to a support contract though, when honestly setting that up and negotiating it and getting it approved by management may itself far outstrip the time they have to get the problem fixed. That doesn't also preclude them opting for a support contract after the fact once the problem is fixed and they reassess their exposure by using ffmpeg in the way they do (why are they pushing out included libs that aren't tested?). Calling them out publicly is probably a good way to get them to decide not to give that support contract though, since you've proven you're unprofessional enough to immediately publish once side of a grievance very publicly, and who wants to deal with worrying about that in the future?
- oefrha 3y ago
  “This is a high priority ticket” — in the context of an FFmpeg ticket it seems quite clear what “this” is: the FFmpeg ticket. When you communicate as employee of company X, you represent company X, especially when you specifically namedrop company X. No one cares or should care whether it’s a “hapless newbie” doing the communication. Maybe do better training next time. (The specific engineer is actually quite senior if you look up their name, but that’s beside the point.) In addition, they didn’t “immediately publish once [sic] side of a grievance”, the ticket happened quite a long time ago and was only brought up in light of the xz fiasco.

politelemon 3y ago

I don't see where they offered payment in that thread. This is low quality ragebait.

planetsulu 3y ago
About offering a payment is here: https://twitter.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178805704888726 https://twitter.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178805704888726

M95D 3y ago

A bit unrelated to this news: I clicked the link to the bug tracker and saw this reply from MS team: "We are going to proceed to make a release today and test with customers." They test their releases directly with customers? What happened to the alpha and beta testers?

theshrike79 3y ago
> What happened to the alpha and beta testers? They're called customers =) Of course they won't release it 100%, they'll do a limited rollout and see if something blows up.
prmoustache 3y ago
That is the point of canary release process and it is not as bad as it sounds. I know bean counters, software managers and IT people love to use the word critical for nearly everything, but in the grand, and even medium scheme of things, there is nothing critical in Teams. We aren't talking medical equipment, nuclear stuff or some simulation platform to make sure buildings are sounds and will not collapse.
trympet 3y ago
Microsoft eats its own dog food and refers to internal “alpha testers” as customers.

HeavyStorm 3y ago

Disclaimer: I work for msft, but I don't represent them in this matter nor I have any insider information. I just read the posts. The bug post is clearly from a developer who I assume is a bit desperate to fix an issue. He certainly isn't representing Microsoft in the bug post - I assume he was naive and thought mentioning Microsoft would bring attention to the issue (it did, the wrong kind). There's no information about the "offer" Microsoft made, but I'll take a guess: we have an initiative that selects through voting open source projects that are awarded a one time payment of "a few thousand dollars". Unless evidenced otherwise by ffmpeg, I would assume this is where that money is coming from. A company as big as Microsoft has lots of procedures and bureaucracies involved in contracting with third parties, and I don't think they were aiming for a support contract in this instance, or, at best, someone looking for help found a simpler way of paying out, instead of going through the proper channels. People tend to see big companies as an entity of their own, instead of a bunch of people running different processes around. I think the lesson here is that we need to educate our developers on how to communicate with open source projects and third parties.

kierank 3y ago
Hi, this is a high priority ticket and FFmpeg is used in highly visible products all over the world. We have developers working for free while trillion dollar corporations want urgent help from volunteers. Please help, /s
internetter 3y ago
> People tend to see big companies as an entity of their own, instead of a bunch of people running different processes around. This is for the better. By invoking the microsoft card, they became representatives of the company. If you are using your company status to gain something, you are acting on behalf of said company. Look up respondeat superior
int_19h 3y ago
I also work for MSFT, and this story is frankly embarrassing. It's not even this particular case, it's that this is a pattern, both Microsoft-wide and industry-wide. The initiative you describe is part of the problem - it wouldn't even be relevant in this situation if we as a company properly funded the dependencies that we use. As you say, Microsoft has lots of procedures and bureaucracies, yet we have streamlined the use of F/OSS significantly compared to 12 years ago (I know; I was there when you had to have multiple meetings with lawyers every time you pulled in an open source dependency). Why didn't we do the same for supporting those dependencies? Why is it not part of the same workflow, even? Surely if something is a critical component in a shipping product, it needs to be sponsored appropriately automatically?

poisonborz 3y ago

One developer from Microsoft Teams opened a badly worded bug ticket = "Microsoft is making demands"?

onion2k 3y ago
Asking for help is not the same as making demands. To make a demand there has to be a downside for the person who you want to do something.
badgersnake 3y ago
I’m amazed anyone would admit they work on Teams in public. It’s so incredibly bad.
- Mashimo 3y ago
  Works fine here.
internetter 3y ago
Yes. Respondeat superior