Hacker News Reader

Comment by beanjuiceII | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

You're confused about what is the right order. Technical supports usually come after the corresponding support contract, not inverse.

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?

> 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.

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

Nearly a decade ago they partially ported their database to Linux?

I guess that completely invalidates everything else they've done since

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?

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.

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?

It wasn't supposed to be a gotcha, just an effort to move the discussion into interesting territory.

That said, I wouldn't call a product that diverged from Sybase SQL Server entirely in 1995, was converted to C++ a few years, later, had a complete revision of the old Sybase code in 2005, and has continued to add features over time consistently then being converted to work on Linux as something that could be dismissed as technically unimpressive for the sole reason that 20 years earlier before all that it started out as working on UNIX systems. It started this journey before Linux even existed.[1]

The big innovation, which is obvious to anyone that bothered to look into it, is that they provided and optimized system call agnostic layer to provide accurate, performant access to the base system in a way that was OS independent, and was lauded as fairly impressive and interesting at the time. That people are so fixated on the company that own the product that they can't even assess something on its own merits before dismissing it because of its association with that parent company is exactly the problem I was alluding to originally. The whole reason there's a note in the guidelines about avoiding shallow dismissals is because it lowers the quality of the site in general for everyone.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server

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.

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.

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)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com