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VLC maintainer has refused “several tens of millions of Euro”
- squarefoot 9y agoAn admirable move indeed if it was a physical object, but I'm not sure it's the right one when software is involved. Thanks to Open source licensing, a fork would have been trivial: I'd have forked the project, then taken the money and donate half of it to EFF, GNU and other freedom friendly organizations. In a few years the word of mouth that brought VLC as no.1 player would replace it with a new one. Although in different contexts, it already happened with Openoffice->Libreoffice, Owncloud->Nextcloud, MySQL->MariaDB etc. By doing so I would have helped myself and other people in need while taking money from advertisers.
- fencepost 9y agoNo, because a huge percentage of the user base doesn't follow tech news and is likely not even technical. All of those people would only know that their experience just gradually went to hell.
- fmx 9y agoHow did those users come to learn about VLC Player and what would stop them from learning about the fork the same way?
- jbk 9y agoThat would take years.
- mook 9y agoRemember OpenOffice.org? That is still getting ~100,000 downloads a day in April this year [1]. That's after all the Linux distros moved to LibreOffice for years. Forks work for moving development, but not necessarily for moving users. [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/729460/ https://lwn.net/Articles/729460/
- sounds 9y agoMySQL and MariaDB are another example, if you need one. :)
- cygx 9y agoHow did those users come to learn about VLC Player A computer-savvy acquaintance installed it for them once upon a time.
- bigbugbag 9y agoIt seems you never had to deal with such users, they talk about that orange thing or the traffic cone. Which should be more than enough to explain why they would not migrate.
- jordigh 9y agoI don't get the mentality of whoever offered the money. I mean, great that the money wasn't accepted, but it seems so stupid to try to force ads into something that can easily be forked and have the ads removed. I get the impression the idiots who offered the money just don't understand logiciel libre.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y agoThey're buying the brand. People know and trust the VLC brand so they'll have an audience for a while before the forked project replaces them in the hearts and minds of the community. The new project will be less trusted because users were betrayed by the old one. If you actually care about the openness of the project, selling it is a bad idea regardless of forkability.
- hackbinary 9y agoI think some similar things have happened with popular plugins for Firefox, Chrome, Atom and VScode. And also for some apps for Android and iPhone. This reminds me of the adage: "When the product is free, you are the product".
- AsyncAwait 9y agoThat's why you want them to be free software.
- dest 9y agoAdblock Plus, despite being open source, seems to be quite a profitable business. The main point is the inertia of the user base.
- the_common_man 9y agoBest of luck finding people to maintain the fork with high integrity. Fwiw, I have never seen a fork of an active project succeed
- jordigh 9y ago
- fiokoden 9y agoSadly, can't say I'd have such integrity. I have bills to pay.
- abyssin 9y agoWell, you have some choice regarding the amount of bills you have to pay. I'm not saying I'd have such integrity myself, though.
- icebraining 9y agoAnd you think he doesn't? Besides working on VLC, he does consulting on the side to pay for his.
- orwin 9y agoWell, he earn his life well enough, have a really decent and cheap healthcare, and free education for his kids, what need those millions would fill? Honestly, in any european country, winning around 60k per year (as an employee) or 100k (as a business owner), if you are not living in Paris or London, is enough to provide you a carefree life. You don't need to sell yourself for more.
- icebraining 9y agoHe does live in Paris, though.
- jz10 9y agoFeel free to reward the man's integrity here https://www.videolan.org/thank_you.html https://www.videolan.org/thank_you.html
- hamandcheese 9y agoYou probably meant to link here: https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money
- mikevm 9y agoIf the software had ads, it'd lose its popularity anyway...
- fiokoden 9y agoHe could offer ad free, plus free with ads.
- romanovcode 9y agoBut you can cash in and leave the software to die like uTorrent authors did for example.
- agumonkey 9y agoSomeone suggested that in the AMA. Take the cash, then fork and let users migrate. OP then used the word "morale".
- Iv 9y agoAnd half of /r/france offered to suck his dick as a result. (Seriously) it was hilarious.
- bigbugbag 9y agoIt is not so simple. Many users would be left on the sidelines and the trust would be damaged forever. If something like this had happened I would have migrated the machines I maintain for sure but probably not to the VLC fork.
- jbk 9y agoThat's me. However, I am not the VLC creator, just the one working on it since 10+ years. And I created the non-profit organization. See the AMA for more details ;)
- agumonkey 9y agoAny new funding attempts btw ?
- jbk 9y agoSerious people offering money? A couple. Clean business models? none. Spyware and hacking is not a clean business model, as far as I am concerned. But, you know, you can invest in my startup, if you prefer :)
- agumonkey 9y agoOh no I meant like kickstarter, or any other similar platform. Emacs Magit author just finished one. People gave enough for him to work for about a year.
- ekimekim 9y agoI feel like Patreon would be a good fit here.
- agumonkey 9y agoIt's the most cited in the recent months.
- tiernano 9y agoI’d back it!
- foepys 9y agoWhy? Just setup a recurring donation via Paypal or something else. Giving Patreon 30% (or whatever they take) is completely unnecessary. Patreon also requires creators to regularly post updates and provide goodies to their subscribers. What could the VLC developers even give to their subscribers except publicly available changelogs? The devs should - and I believe also want to - rather develop the player instead of thinking about what to give to maybe 50 people on Patreon every other week.
- throwaway9980 9y agoCould be me, but the headline is confusing. I thought at first that several tens of millions intended to keep VLC ad free had been refused. Thankfully we dodged that bullet.
- sleepless 9y agoAwesome. Thanks a lot! Can we now add SSL to the website please, since VLC already appeared as attack vector in tools like FinFisher.
- jbk 9y agoSSL is already there.
- icebraining 9y agoWhy doesn't it auto-redirect? (Not a criticism, just curiosity.)
- sleepless 9y agoKey question indeed. And HSTS would be the cream on top. But let's start with redirects.
- snakeanus 9y agoWhat is the point of the redirects? If the user wants to use the https version he would directly go to that (either manually or by using something like httpseverywhere). Why force to user to use a specific one?
- icebraining 9y agoBecause most people have no idea what HTTPS is, let alone that you can manually switch between the two. Nor do they know what a browser addon is, let alone knowing that specific one exists.
- snakeanus 9y agoIn that case they should deal with the consequences of their ignorance.
- snakeanus 9y agoI fail to see what the problem with accepting ads would be, after all anyone who did not want the ads could simply fork the software. Even he could make a ads-free fork. Moreover I am pretty sure that all GNU/Linux distros would include it without any ads. Also, he might have refused "refused several tens of millions of € to keep the software ads free" however he did not mind relicensing VLC for free under a less copyleft and user-protecting license so that it would be included in the apple store.
- baybal2 9y agoPeople like this keep OSS community going
- harmlessposter 9y agoWhy? VLC is amazing software and I deeply thank you for your efforts :)
- zodiac 9y ago> Why? Click the link to find out! The money was to put in some kind of ads or sponsored content
- Numberwang 9y agoI've moved on to mpv.io these days, but VLC still holds a special place in my heart.
- DarkCrusader2 9y agoBe sure to check out gnome-mpv if you on gnome and haven't heard of it yet.
- fiokoden 9y agoI think there's nothing at all wrong with differentiating into paid and free. No ads needed.
- KGIII 9y agoI think you're right, in that there is nothing wrong with it. But, I believe their goal is to keep it free as in beer and free as in speech. Noble goals, indeed.
- NicoJuicy 9y agoI once sollicitaties for a company that did tv streaming for hotels, everything was based on VLC... That was amazing to hear!
- overcast 9y agoThe smart move would have been to take the tens of millions of dollars, retire, and spend it developing VLC Too if you'd like. Ala Mysql > MariaDB.
- fencepost 9y agoNo, because the user bases are completely different. If you're pulling down an open source database and setting it up there's a certain minimum technical skill level that can be assumed. The same can't be said for a consumer video player.
- jbk 9y agoThis ^^ Exactly right.
- overcast 9y agoI'm honestly not sure what that has anything to do with making millions of dollars, and forking VLC to the next iteration like how MySQL to MariaDB was played out. Where does the user base come into the discussion? You're on a forum, whose users primary motivation is starting companies. We're here to make money. If someone offers you tens of millions of dollars for a video player, you take it, and go enjoy life.
- fencepost 9y agoThere are plenty of folks here for whom 'comfortable' money would be just fine when accompanied by 'make the world a better place, and avoid doing things that make it a worse place.'
- Sephr 9y agoI would rather they took the money and forked VLC. It would be big enough news that most users would switch and the development would only benefit from the extra cash. If the initial media attention isn't enough, they could spend some of the excess on an ad campaign to inform users that "the most popular VLC fork is now [new name]".
- cup-of-tea 9y agoBut that's deceitful and wrong. There is nothing wrong with paying someone for advertising space.
- Sephr 9y agoWhat's deceitful about it? It seems like the person making this offer didn't really think this through, considering that VLC is open source. The name is meaningless if they implement ads.
- EpicEng 9y ago>It would be big enough news that most users would switch and the development would only benefit from the extra cash. You think most of VLC's users are the type who would read about a fork on a site like this? I imagine their user base is much larger than that.
- Sephr 9y agoAdding ads is a significant enough negative change alone to get adequate media attention outside of sites like Hacker News.
- EpicEng 9y agoFor a product like VLC? I don't know about that. The average user will put up with quite a bit of crap from their software, and I don't imagine e.g. my wife would be reading about ads in VLC on pbs.org.
- the_common_man 9y agoOut of curiosity, what do you think about silicon valley startups :)
- rakshithbekal 9y agoVLC hasn't done much to improve picture quality. An mpc and madvr combination easily trumps it and yet you want to donate to this cookie cutter program to only maintain but not make it better? MPC was on the verge of being stopped of development until few people made the effort to volunteer and contribute to code.
- slrz 9y agoI assume you're not talking about the mpd command line client of that name? At least I wouldn't know how it relates to video quality, though it plays music quite nicely. The other mpc I can easily get to does multi-precision arithmetic on the complex numbers. Also unlikely to be a match. So there's your problem. Your software is hard to use and hard to find out about. Get it into distros so that installing it and trying it out is as painless as possible. If I don't know it exists or have to hunt around the web for a copy, I'm unlikely to donate to it.