this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Can someone enlighten me why a one-time payment of a few thousand for a bugfix is unacceptable? I feel like I'm missing something.
I think the maintainer just viewed the bug report as tone deaf. Microsoft is a trillion dollar company and apparently relying on this library without a support contract. Then they a open a high priority bug item. The maintainer saying it's unacceptable is them basically saying they won't prioritize any work unless there's an existing support contract and that they don't do one off payments for bug fixes, which I think is fair.
A trillion dollar company using your product in one of their flagship products without a support contract can fuck right off.
Microsoft should be putting up money via the support contract to support the creators in maintaining and further development of their product.
A one off payment might be technically sufficient, it is not ethically or morally sufficient. And to put it in terms shareholders understand.. support contract is cheaper than the cost of an alternative.
Well it depends on the size of the one time payment. A 6 or 7 figure one time payment would likely get a maintainer to do something. But micro$oft should really be paying a long term support contract for sure.
There was no bug to fix, the PM didn't keep up with developments in an (apparently) core dependency and was passing outdated arguments to ffmpeg. The fix was for the project to update how it was passing flags to ffmpeg. They'd rather spend the time opening a ticket on ffmpeg's bugtracker and spend thousands of company money begging ffmpeg to help them, when MS is a massive corporation, is apparently relying on ffmpeg, yet has hitherto established no support relationship and also has developed no internal expertise on ffmpeg
They easily could have opened up the code and looked around to find the problem, or checked the changelog since an update broke it, or just rolled back to the last-known working version until they had time to figure it out, instead they just dumped it on ffmpeg's doorstep like their hair was on fire. FFMPEG's development model is explicitly that they iterate quickly and there are very likely to be poorly documented breaking changes between versions. It's not one you pull a new version of casually.
Ok, this time I read the full ticket, so ….
I love to hate on Microsoft too, but I only see one asshole here
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.
Thanks was too lazy to read the actual issue - exactly what i expected
The maintainer is a human that needs to eat every day, and not just whenever their services are needed. So at least, the sum of money would need to be a few times higher than whatever labour the fix takes.
But then, the maintainer's ability to fix these bugs doesn't come from nowhere. They worked on this project for likely a long time, which would also need to be taken into account when agreeing on a sum.
Further, this would be business to business. And those contracts often include the value that the client gets out of the software. So if Microsoft makes billions from this open source library, then the maintainer's - as a business - should receive a payment that reflects this for the fix.
All that implies that a few thousand is not nearly enough. Maybe 100k and the maintainer would budge.
Companies hate giving out cash. Even if it's for software they critically need.
I think for most cases getting the cash is the easy part, and the hard part is getting all the paperwork in place to validate payments to random external entities. If that was easy, nothing would stop any low-level manager from making cash payments to random users with a GitHub account.
All of the other things you mention can be solved with money. In terms of the things that are easy and hard, this very much the former.
The real hard part here is whomever in charge of making the actual decision, to expense a pittance.
this is true. I tried to donate a small sum to an open source package my team uses a lot. I gave up after weeks of fighting the finance bureucracy.
Long term maintenance. Meaning not a simple bug fix but providing support on demand and possibly prioritizing requests by the contract grantor for an extended period.
Fixing a bug for a fee will create a liability and obligations for the developer. Should you mess it up, Microsoft will have no issue burying you to save even just face.
I can see him getting into a long term relationship that could guarantee the projects survival long-term,(and you at least invest some money for a lawyer to tell you what your are signing on for). For something that would get a few months for the project not so much.