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faitswulff

Their donation page: https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money

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Just gave $50. I've been using VLC for years.

Same here. Honestly didn't realize they had no model for income.

There are lots of excellent projects that have income issues: GnuPG, OpenBSD to cite the most prominent ones.

https://www.gnupg.org/donate/index.html (though they are at ~€5k/month now?)

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2018.html http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

What is annoying is many groups like this make it hard for us that have employers that will match donations for non-profits to donate.

I tried to get OpenBSD added to our companies system awhile back but the group that manages that process said they did not get a response from the OpenBSD group when they reached out to them to get a bit of information.

I can (and do) donate outside of my companies process, but they are missing out on additional money.

Someone wanted to give them millions to put ads on it, but the primary maintainer said no way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048

That would be me :)

Out of curiosity, have you considered monetization strategies like an open pay-per-video store? VLC is awesome, and I kind of wish it got the monetary compensation it deserves hah. I've heard that indie movie distribution is a dreadful space.

We are exploring some ways but we have nothing to announce yet.

Such things does not exist because of copyright holders forces DRM

Certainly no expert in the field here, but maybe a store/market built around vimeo's "on demand" stuff? A partnership with vimeo whereby VLC would get a % of sales when purchased via VLC might help both parties (more exposure to vimeo via VLC, revenue for VLC, etc).

Is vimeo on-demand DRM free?

https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/224821167-Does-Vime...

It seems that it's up to the content owners as to how much they would want to enable.

https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/235694348-How-to-bu...

"When you buy a VOD, you will be able to stream its videos for as long as they remain on Vimeo. If the seller allows, you will also be able to download the videos to your computer and devices, DRM-free."

Is it not.

Thanks so much for it!

I naively thought free projects were as resistant as VLC when it comes to manipulation for the sake of money, but big and even often cheered ones gave in.

A bad business model can be worse than having none.

Thanks - just sent you guys $50.

> I've been using VLC for years.

Good point: there is plenty of software where people have no issues with buying a new licence every couple of years,

Compare that to (in my case) sixteen years of happy VLC usage across many different computers and phones, and it's obvious that I have some donations to catch up on!

Yeah I gave a few years ago but considering how many hours of playback I've had since then, time to donate again.

Could they set up a Patreon, or is that only for individuals?

* Recurring SEPA transfer? (Europe-only AFAICT) * Use their Paypal link, see if you can enable recurring payment there? (I'm not familiar with this though)

Leads of other open source projects have patreon accounts

liberapay please

Thanks for the link. It had honestly not occurred to me to donate before. VLC has been around for so long, and has always worked well, been unobtrusive, and made so few unnecessary changes, that I have taken it for granted. I wish I could say the same for other open source software, then I might donate to them too.

Oh hey they take donation in crypto currency! Nice! I wish more open source projects did.

Thanks for linking, VLC has been one of my favorite pieces of software for, idk, at least 15 years, so donating is a no brainer.

Thanks for posting the link. Donating was so easy I actually did it (glad to help with $20) :))).

Tried to donate but PayPal was useless as usual

I gave 10€.

They need an Ethereum address

So that the $20 donation one minute can turn into $50 the next minute... Oops i mean $15, no $35, whoops $12, wait $27.

Edit: $14

Edit: $117

Edit: got hacked

Still better than $0.

Maybe they do, but they currently accept BTC and Monero. Just convert your ETH to one of those :)

Why donations via Paypal? Paypal sucks and steals! They make up their own (totally unreasonable) rates for exchanging Euro's to USD..

Better show an Ethereum address or so, it's just a few minutes work and might render a much larger donation due to the expected increase in price over time.

maybe because a lot of the potential people you might want to donate actually use paypal?

there's already monero and bitcoin donation addresses there, but paypal is something most people already know about and can deal with (from multiple currencies around the globe).

I've downloaded a couple of hundreds of euros last year to various open source and Internet advocacy projects, and I've always used PayPal to do so.

I love the projects I've donated to, but not enough to trust them all not to fuck up storing my banking info. This way, I have all my donations easily available via one interface that I don't use for much else.

Paypal is "easy" to setup and maintain for many donation type cases like this, and provides an incredibly low barrier for entry to accept donations, this low barrier of entry can easily make up (to the developers) for the skimming done by paypal with fees and bad currency conversions. Also keep in mind that people in europe are likely not converting to USD when donating, the VLC non-profit is europe based so there's likely not a conversion there happening. It's going to happen USD to Euro though. And if that's still a concern, you can also do a direct bank transfer in europe pretty easily as they provide that information, making it without fees for a lot of EU citizens.

And while they don't have an Ethereum address, they do have bitcoin and monero, two of the biggest players in this space. It would be nice to see more options just so that one could use whatever cryptocurrency is going to have lower transaction fees at the time.

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