> in the context of an FFmpeg ticket it seems quite clear what “this” is: the FFmpeg ticket. It can be. It can also be the person submitting it noting that it

> in the context of an FFmpeg ticket it seems quite clear what “this” is: the FFmpeg ticket. It can be. It can also be the person submitting it noting that it's high priority to them or their org. That can be useful information, but it's not necessarily a demand. > When you communicate as employee of company X, you represent company X, especially when you specifically namedrop company X. That's both obviously true and obviously doesn't matter in some instances. If some intern at a company starts throwing a company name around, the complaints should be seen by the company, but if it's obvious it's an intern then it's also obvious it's not something it's possible to ever entirely prevent, and in some cases it's expected it will happen and it's just a matter of how they respond internally to prevent it (Microsoft has something like 220k employees. Employees misrepresenting the company will happen). The more power a person has at the company the less we should expect this is okay and the more criticism they should get. It scales from the intern to the CEO. I think this is fairly obvious. If the person in question is in a senior position and was actually demanding something on behalf of Microsoft, then I agree they individually and to some degree Microsoft should be criticized for this, but I'm not sure that's what happened here, so I'll reserve my criticism. > 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. Okay, so not immediate, which is my mistake, but it is one side of the argument with little clarification of the claims made other than the support request ticket, which doesn't go into details about the negotiations for support at all. Consider that someone from MS could just as easily have posted something to twitter referencing that ticket and saying "We tried to work with an open source project to get a bug fixed, and even offered them money to fix it, and instead they tried to get us on a long term support before it was fixed. Unacceptable." We'd have just as much information about the specifics of what happened behind the scenes, which is none, and all it does it leave people to use their per-existing biases to fill in the missing information and choose who to believe. Better, IMO, to reserve judgement pending additional info.