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 are likely other changes made since they released that version to their customers, so the risk is other things in addition to the current thing get broken.
There is zero chance that they’ll just build from the latest main branch and release that tomorrow. Or that whatever build they make goes directly to general distribution.
They’ll make a build from the last release plus this patch and send it to a few customers who have complained. Then they’ll think about making a release with this and perhaps other bug fixes.
If the Microsoft person making this request can’t update a command line switch, I seriously doubt they will try to build from source with a patch.