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Comment by NoahKAndrews | Hacker News Reader

Edit: nevermind, they are in fact affiliated, and most of the core VLC devs work at VideoLabs. I've kept the original comment below.

This blog post links to the "VideoLab Store", hosted at https://videolabs.io, which prominently uses a logo extremely similar but not identical to the VLC (which stands for VideoLAN, not VideoLab) logo. Their homepage even goes as far as displaying "Hire the VLC team" as its headline.

As far as I'm aware, VideoLab has nothing to do with the VideoLAN non-profit, and it very much seems like they are intentionally trying to mislead people into thinking that they are the developers of VLC.

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(President of VideoLAN here).

So far, VideoLabs is hiring most of the VLC core developers and those people are the main force of development of VLC. It's setup this way so that if the Videolabs company does not live forever, VLC stays forever free, and the non-profit lives.

This is quite classic of open source projects, and in the case of VideoLAN, there are 3 or 4 companies doing consulting.

Very cool, that definitely makes sense! I've edited my comment, apologies for that. Hopefully bringing attention to the fact that you guys are easily available for hire ends up doing more good than harm.

What does this mean? What harm does it do?

The harm I imagine would be the reputation damage from people believing that "they are intentionally trying to mislead people into thinking that they are the developers of VLC." NoahKAndrews, having been informed that these really are the devs of VLC, is hoping his earlier, uninformed statement did not cause too many people to think poorly of VideoLabs.

I love this model! Love what you guys do, and please keep up the good work.

> As far as I'm aware, VideoLab has nothing to do with the VideoLAN non-profit

VideoLabs is a company which has been founded by one of the creators of VLC/VideoLAN and president of the VideoLAN non-profit.

It's basically a for-profit that hired/employs most of the VLC main contributors and pay them a salary to work on that ecosystem while providing consulting and other services to finance all that.

They are significant contributors to the VLC codebase.

After having worked with them in the context of a partnership, I can add that "for-profit" is mostly the legal form but not the mindset.

Well, the author does have a link to the git forge of the VideoLAN project prominently displayed on the blog and also contributes to projects there: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/LibVLCSharp

Additionally, Videolabs is listed at https://www.videolan.org/videolan/partners.html

I guess the project is well-aware of the corporation.

Just discovered some of that myself, I'm glad everything's on the up-and-up.

From their about page:

Videolabs was born from the VideoLAN community and started by maintaining the VLC ports on mobile. It is now the main contributor to VLC, hiring its historical developers, and building custom solutions around the VLC and FFmpeg ecosystems.

The CTO is the president of the VideoLAN non-profit, so it seems accurate. Supposedly from their about page they’re the primary maintainers of vlc.

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