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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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They'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.

I 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".

That's why you want them to be free software.

Best of luck finding people to maintain the fork with high integrity. Fwiw, I have never seen a fork of an active project succeed

Xorg is a fork of XFree86 which was made just because a relatively mild advertising clause was added to the XFree86 license. This resulted in the complete death of XFree86.

People really hate ads. With Adblock Plus, there has been no forking because it's kind of hard to tell unless you're paying attention that it lets some ads through. Either way, I think a lot of people have moved on to uBlock Origin.

Don't underestimate the outrage caused by an ad where there was none before.

Adblock Plus, despite being open source, seems to be quite a profitable business. The main point is the inertia of the user base.

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