There’s a piece of software that I use at work for managing tickets for a client, every time I open it there’s a note that the app will be replaced next month on the 1st. This notice gets updated on the 27th of each month without fail by the end of day. For now critical infrastructure remains running on a windows xp machine that we remote into using the only software that let’s people connect to it.

The problem is that Microsoft wants to pay that for a permanent “never maintain in a way that breaks caption decoding in any default behaviour we use” with that one time payment.

Its a quick fix on Microsofts end to change a quick flag in ffmpeg. It’s also quick on their end to maintain a fork that only changes the default. One time payments for maintenance make open source projects like ffmpeg subject to fail.

Hilariously the issue was just a setting change in the update, that you can easily change via a command option. They saw thing didn’t work, and didn’t read the change log at all before asking to pay a one time fee to guarantee it be maintained for them.

Power supply… You’re next option is to remove the power supply from the computer… With a chainsaw.

I may be taking slightly drastic action.