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Comment by jbk | Hacker News Reader

OK, so, this is me talking.

This is an old interview that resurfaces lately (no idea why), and it was done by a HR company, and they did a lot of cuts. So, it is far from being technically accurate, and some parts are quite weird.

Clearly not for the HN crowd, tbh.

I dislike those kind of interviews, because they focus on one person (people-isation trend that we see also in startups) while VLC was done by a collective. It is sure that I'm the person that spent the most time on VLC and other VideoLAN projects than anyone else, but the work is a collective one.

Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer.

(inb4 mpv, mpc-hc, potplayer is better...)

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First of all, merci pour tout ce que t'as fait.

I think people will understand, if they read the article, that VLC is not a one-person project. You make it pretty clear in the interview.

VLC is one of the biggest open source projects _ever_. For it to maintain its quality over 18 years(!), it needs a leader with a vision and integrity. If it wasn't for an interview like this, people wouldn't know about the collective work that's happening behind the scenes. It's kind of a "necessary evil" to have a single person exposed to the media. And I'm pretty sure that VLC would have either died, been sold, or turned into adware if it wasn't for you.

So I think it's a benefit overall to have you as the sole focus.

> Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name,

Thank you.

> ... or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer.

Thank you a lot.

I know right? So many good projects have failed to maintain their integrity and changed for the worst. It’s hard to trust software these days but there are exceptions and VLC is one of them.

It didn't help that at some point on of the main distribution points for FOSS shipped archives stuffed with malware that the authors had no idea about.

Yeah, I used to place some trust in programs under certain licenses, or downloaded from that place. Now the license is a hard requirement and so is not being from that place.

Do you mean Sourceforge, Softonic or both?

Looking at you, uTorrent. It went from the most easily recommendable torrent client to an utter piece of garbage overnight.

I'm looking at you Whatsapp. The founders clearly lied in the manifesto and sold their soul to Facebook which Zuckerberg was more than happy to take advantage of.

Just wanted to throw in my appreciation for VLC and the team behind it. I just realized after this, that I've been using VLC for more than half my life at this point. It's always one of the first things I install on a new system or phone. Thanks for all the hard work over the years from you and everybody that's worked on VLC.

Same! I don't actually USE it much, but I keep it around for the weird cases. It can even transcode.

There also seems to be an effort to turn it into an NLE, which is very cool: https://www.videolan.org/vlmc/.

> Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer.

Thank you for your integrity. You walked away from enough money to retire on, out of a principled commitment to free quality software. That deserves a lot of respect.

Hi Jean-Baptiste, I remember we met in Munich about 10 years ago, at a Qt conference, and had a little chat. Was nice meeting you there, "l'eau a coulé sous les ponts depuis" like we say, I'm glad you stayed true with your values since.

Not ignoring the downsides you point out in the article, this line alone makes it worth the read:

Sure, more money would be fun, but most of the people I know who have more money are annoying.

Yeah, that line went straight into my internet quotes collection

Yes, I truly believe so. With a tiny bit of exaggeration, of course, but the idea is here.

Brilliant!! Just for that I'd love you but you also happen to be an awesome individual.

I still enjoyed the response to finding good developers. Seems like a sane response :)

Also thanks for the work on VLC, it's one of those things that's always been installed on my PC since the early 2000s. :)

Do you need any support with the website? as a front-end dev it's all I could contribute. I don't mean bells and whistles, just cleaning things up, making stuff consistent, improving galleries and that sort of thing. I've been using VLC for as long as I can remember so would be nice to give something back.

Yes, a lot. It looks ok, but there is a LOT of technical debt. It is static, with PHP and a bit of JS.

Also, if you know Vue.js, we need help on the new web interface of VLC. :D

How can more of us help? I'm a php developer with css/js/vue skills also.

Hey hi, I have experience in Vue. How can I contribute?

How can I get in touch to help with the main site? The VueJS front-end is something I'd be interested in helping with too. React background wrt web apps but happy to dive in.

You guys (I mean people who write free open software in general) are inspiration for me! Not only for me, I feel like many people appreciate FOSS but don't speak up about it often..

> I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name

Out of curiosity, could you give ball-park numbers?

Last I heard it was in the order of tens of millions of euros [0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/736ghk/ama_je_suis_...

It would be so easy to come up with excuses for taking that kind of money. The guy has all my respect.

>(inb4 mpv, mpc-hc, potplayer is better...)

Well mpv can play full-range videos with correct colors... ;) But for everything that isn't a full-range video, I usually prefer VLC. So thanks!

> Well mpv can play full-range videos with correct colors... ;)

VLC can too, if compiled correctly with the libplacebo dependency. It shares most of the shaders with mpv.

Hmm, interesting. Unfortunately I wasn't planning on compiling VLC myself, but maybe I should.

Interestingly...

I have a collection of subtitled videos from several years ago. When I obtained them, I watched them in VLC with no problems.

A year or two ago, I had the urge to watch them again, and I wasn't able to use VLC, because it could no longer display the subtitles correctly. This prompted me to start using mpv instead of VLC, for pretty much everything. But I'm still confused at how VLC could have lost the ability to play files it once handled perfectly.

I think there's been a lot of work in the past years on the subtitles display for VLC (but I might be entirely wrong).

I'm sure that if you still have those videos, the devs at videolan would be very happy to test them to repro that bug.

Thank you. I love VLC.

Pass my sentiments along to the collective. You all did great work.

I donate every few downloads. It is not much, but maybe enough people do it to matter.

I liked the interview. Particularly the parts about maintainability / modularity, and hiring developers. Are any parts of that inaccurate, or do you (still) stand behind them? Are there any interviews / documents where you elaborate on those topics?

> Are any parts of that inaccurate, or do you (still) stand behind them?

Everything is mostly accurate, it is just the technical details that are not.

> Are there any interviews / documents where you elaborate on those topics?

No. Mail me :)

Just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work over the years!

How much money specifically, just for curiosity? More than $1m?

Way more.

Were you able to make a decent living with related works?

I am happy with my life.

The most important thing of them all

It's not worth much, but you have my respect. I'm not sure I could've made that choice.

You're a good person.

Thank you for everything.

You sir are a God among men. Thank you for all your work.

Thankyouthankyouthankyou

Love VLC player my man, one of the most impressive pieces of software imo.

Thank you and the other VideoLAN people

Can I throw in my sincere thanks for VLC. Back in the early 00s a media player that - gasp - actually played videos versus 'visualisations' or printing messages requiring you to install codecs was a rare and welcome thing! And still is !

I am really happy of the video, so I shared it on linkedin ... The most important part for me is when you spoke about creativity and knowing the web stack in order to be a good web dev. That has to be said, even if there cuts...

I've not used it in a while (or anything similar). But I relied on VLC heavily in the past and it was a godsend. I can't thank you enough for your efforts and your integrity - you are the real MVP

What I don't like about it is how anti-money it is... for apparently no reason.

For example, he said he doesn't want to work on it full time because then he would burn out. His solution is to get a job not working on VLC and then just work on VLC full time.

But that just shifts the burn out to his official employer.

The main challenge is that most OSS companies don't have healthy revenue models for building B2C apps like VLC.

Customers refuse to pay which is why you see companies like Facebook that make the consumer the product.

If you have two products that do the same thing. A and B.

A respects your privacy and charges you $1.99 per month.

B sells your data and is free.

... the customers will all block to B and A will stagnate or just outright die.

> But that just shifts the burn out to his official employer.

I'm my own employer...

Thank-you for all the work that you and your team do.

I always wanted to thank you and your team for the awesome work. Thank you!

Thank you for your service, you've made the world a better place.

Thank you for giving so much of your time, and for your integrity.

Great work, thank you.

VLC is truly amazing. Thank you for keeping it free.

Respect, c’est tout ce que j’ai a dire :)

Thank you.

> (inb4 mpv, mpc-hc, potplayer is better...)

We can all enjoy libavcodec in our own special way, VLC is the masochist's lavc frontend, no kink-shaming. :- )

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