An 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.