There are definitely a few OSS that don't get anymore as much love as they deserve. VLC and OBS are two example of programs that are so damn good, even paid alternatives hardly can compete.
Pretty much every top streamer uses it. I wouldn't be surprised if OBS was responsible for generating over $75 million worth of earnings for just the top streamers on Twitch in the last few years, then there's Twitch's cut on top of it. That's going by 1 article saying just the top 10 streamers alone earned $20 million last year alone.
OBS is one of those products where I bet if they put up a Kickstarter asking for support they would end up raising a few million. Come to think of it now, I wonder if Twitch has tried to buy / fund OBS in the past.
It’s amazing software and I would like to see the developers and the organization thrive and be sustainable for the long term.
I wish someone would campaign a bit for the devs and support the development of OBS with all that money made from streaming with OBS.
I wondered how it was even possible, found out they made whole OS-es in a similar manner, been a linux user for over 15 years now.
And a good chunk of it is maintaining & improving a large throughput backend system that is one of the top 10 in the world in terms of size and data volume.
And on top of that, an even smaller fraction is the people who think of and implement new front end things that you would interact with and think of the app changing. Like a lot of companies, it's probably a 10:1 ratio as far as backend:frontend people there are at the company.
As to why twitter changes so little, the company itself doesn't really understand why it's successful, so there is a lot of conservatism inside of it to not screw with the golden goose.
MPC-HC only works on windows, so it's not comparable. mpv has also a lot of target platforms, but not as much as VLC. It's really nice though, and I think a bit of competition is good.
I think it's fine to compare projects when going beyond "which one is the bestest".