
VLC maintainer has refused “several tens of millions of Euro” - iamcreasy
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/73dafr/vlc_creator_refused_several_tens_of_millions_of/
======
jbk
That's me.

However, I am not the VLC creator, just the one working on it since 10+ years.
And I created the non-profit organization.

See the AMA for more details ;)

~~~
NicoJuicy
Time to donate
[https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money](https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money)

Thanks VLC team for all the good years !

~~~
VMG
I love it when the Bitcoin QR code is just right there. Donated 10mbtc

~~~
mrb
Ditto, I donated 5 mbtc. I love the _zero-friction_ experience of paying in
bitcoins. Click the link, instantly opens my wallet, type amount and hit send.
Done.

No need to wait for a slow site to load and having to click through multiple
confirmation screens (Paypal)...

~~~
KekDemaga
Paypal is two clicks now. Click buy on the site you are buying from, PayPal
loads and logs you in automatically, confirm the amount and click pay.

~~~
hujokilom
God forbid you attempt a donation to a party PayPal doesn't like, they will
just seize your assets.

~~~
KekDemaga
I can only talk about Paypal from the payer side it's virtually frictionless
in my experience and transactions can be disputed via Paypal or my bank.
Buying and using bitcoin adds a number of extra steps as well as transaction
costs in moving dollars into bitcoin as well as giving me no dispute
mechanism.

~~~
mrb
Paypal is pretty frictionless, but it still takes ~15-20 sec to do the 3
clicks through 3 slow-to-load Paypal pages (1: paypal button, 2: page to
specify amount, 3: confirmation page). By contrast, a click on the Bitcoin
address opens my local Bitcoin wallet which opens up instantaneously, and
clicking send is also instantaneous. Total ~3 sec. The difference between
~15-20 and ~3 sec is enough to make me prefer BTC over Paypal.

I don't need the ability to dispute: I am not going to change my mind later
about this donation.

I don't need to buy BTC: like many bitcoin users I already have some in my
possession, ready to be spent at any time.

~~~
moonchrome
How long does it take for the payment to go through ? What's the fee ?

For a donation transfer speed doesn't matter, but for actual purchase it's a
lot more than 30 s last I've tried

~~~
mrb
The payment is broadcasted instantly (1-2 seconds). Fee can be as low as
$0.10-0.30 (eg. these donations to the VLC address
[https://blockchain.info/tx/99ee82b2b8f33ee22c6c51ff4ba198141...](https://blockchain.info/tx/99ee82b2b8f33ee22c6c51ff4ba198141c4283c702ea212bc9edcad19c33d4d2)
[https://blockchain.info/tx/d056b36bdb81f70cf344d4489ba337ad1...](https://blockchain.info/tx/d056b36bdb81f70cf344d4489ba337ad1820e07b0907211ecdff764cb9ed25ba)
[https://blockchain.info/tx/445ba8e7559a4f83bcd7fd7adac30cf9f...](https://blockchain.info/tx/445ba8e7559a4f83bcd7fd7adac30cf9fa4e220c25ccc35e9492fff876937fef)).

It's important to understand the difference between a broadcasted transaction
(tx received by most Bitcoin nodes, "0-confirmation", 1-2 seconds) versus the
transaction being included in at least 1 block ("1 confirmation", ~10
minutes). Some merchants accept 0-confirmation tx, while others require 1
confirmation. But in almost all cases it's fine to accept 0-confirmation
transactions:

• ordering physical goods online (an order takes more than ~10 minutes to be
shipped & delivered anyway)

• ordering virtual goods/services (eg. paying for VPN: the vendor can simply
cancel the service if the tx is never confirmed)

• any low-value real-world transaction (eg. paying for groceries... no one
will bother with a double-spend attack to steal groceries)

• etc

------
jz10
Feel free to reward the man's integrity here
[https://www.videolan.org/thank_you.html](https://www.videolan.org/thank_you.html)

~~~
hamandcheese
You probably meant to link here:
[https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money](https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money)

------
squarefoot
An admirable move indeed if it was a physical object, but I'm not sure it's
the right one when software is involved. Thanks to Open source licensing, a
fork would have been trivial: I'd have forked the project, then taken the
money and donate half of it to EFF, GNU and other freedom friendly
organizations. In a few years the word of mouth that brought VLC as no.1
player would replace it with a new one. Although in different contexts, it
already happened with Openoffice->Libreoffice, Owncloud->Nextcloud,
MySQL->MariaDB etc. By doing so I would have helped myself and other people in
need while taking money from advertisers.

~~~
fencepost
No, because a huge percentage of the user base doesn't follow tech news and is
likely not even technical. All of those people would only know that their
experience just gradually went to hell.

~~~
fmx
How did those users come to learn about VLC Player and what would stop them
from learning about the fork the same way?

~~~
mook
Remember OpenOffice.org? That is still getting ~100,000 downloads a day in
April this year [1]. That's after all the Linux distros moved to LibreOffice
for years. Forks work for moving development, but not necessarily for moving
users.

[1]: [https://lwn.net/Articles/729460/](https://lwn.net/Articles/729460/)

~~~
sounds
MySQL and MariaDB are another example, if you need one. :)

------
jordigh
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.

~~~
hackbinary
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".

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

------
fiokoden
Sadly, can't say I'd have such integrity. I have bills to pay.

~~~
orwin
Well, he earn his life well enough, have a really decent and cheap healthcare,
and free education for his kids, what need those millions would fill?
Honestly, in any european country, winning around 60k per year (as an
employee) or 100k (as a business owner), if you are not living in Paris or
London, is enough to provide you a carefree life. You don't need to sell
yourself for more.

~~~
icebraining
He does live in Paris, though.

~~~
jbk
60k would be enough in Paris, I would say :)

~~~
partisan
Is it weird when people talk about you as if you aren't there? :)

A question for you: How do you stay motivated to work on OSS projects over a
long term?

~~~
jbk
> Is it weird when people talk about you as if you aren't there? :)

Very much weird. Mostly people don't realize I am the one they are talking
about. It is the same on Reddit...

Often I get downvoted on Reddit about VLC, like I don't know what I'm talking
about :)

> A question for you: How do you stay motivated to work on OSS projects over a
> long term?

You find new ideas and new challenges.

~~~
dom0
> Often I get downvoted on Reddit about VLC, like I don't know what I'm
> talking about :)

Hilarious, but somewhat typical for Reddit (and other places with voting
systems).

~~~
knowThySelfx
Democracy is a voting system too :D

~~~
partisan
Not one with downvotes, for better or worse.

------
overcast
The smart move would have been to take the tens of millions of dollars,
retire, and spend it developing VLC Too if you'd like. Ala Mysql > MariaDB.

~~~
fencepost
No, because the user bases are completely different. If you're pulling down an
open source database and setting it up there's a certain minimum technical
skill level that can be assumed. The same can't be said for a consumer video
player.

~~~
overcast
I'm honestly not sure what that has anything to do with making millions of
dollars, and forking VLC to the next iteration like how MySQL to MariaDB was
played out. Where does the user base come into the discussion? You're on a
forum, whose users primary motivation is starting companies. We're here to
make money. If someone offers you tens of millions of dollars for a video
player, you take it, and go enjoy life.

~~~
fencepost
There are plenty of folks here for whom 'comfortable' money would be just fine
when accompanied by 'make the world a better place, and avoid doing things
that make it a worse place.'

~~~
overcast
You can do a lot more good in this world with tens of millions of dollars.

~~~
fencepost
You can also enable people to make the world a significantly crappier place
for millions of people by accepting that money.

If you're going to think of good or happiness as a transactional thing, you
can "steal" some happiness from millions of people to increase your own (e.g.
by getting tens of millions of dollars) but in doing so you've likely
decreased to total happiness of the world. MAYBE you can make up the total
amount of reduced happiness by spending that money to do good somewhere else,
but you can never really know whether you've been successful and you can also
never really know just how much you've worsened people's lives long-term.

I find it unlikely that people interested in purchasing VLC so they could
monetize it would stop at a level that users would consider acceptable.

Selling out your users for money is almost always going to be a net loser in
the currency of happiness in the world.

------
throwaway9980
Could be me, but the headline is confusing. I thought at first that several
tens of millions intended to keep VLC ad free had been refused. Thankfully we
dodged that bullet.

------
Sephr
I would rather they took the money and forked VLC. It would be big enough news
that most users would switch and the development would only benefit from the
extra cash.

If the initial media attention isn't enough, they could spend some of the
excess on an ad campaign to inform users that "the most popular VLC fork is
now [new name]".

~~~
EpicEng
>It would be big enough news that most users would switch and the development
would only benefit from the extra cash.

You think most of VLC's users are the type who would read about a fork on a
site like this? I imagine their user base is much larger than that.

~~~
Sephr
Adding ads is a significant enough negative change alone to get adequate media
attention outside of sites like Hacker News.

~~~
EpicEng
For a product like VLC? I don't know about that. The average user will put up
with quite a bit of crap from their software, and I don't imagine e.g. my wife
would be reading about ads in VLC on pbs.org.

------
baybal2
People like this keep OSS community going

------
rakshithbekal
VLC hasn't done much to improve picture quality. An mpc and madvr combination
easily trumps it and yet you want to donate to this cookie cutter program to
only maintain but not make it better? MPC was on the verge of being stopped of
development until few people made the effort to volunteer and contribute to
code.

~~~
slrz
I assume you're not talking about the mpd command line client of that name? At
least I wouldn't know how it relates to video quality, though it plays music
quite nicely. The other mpc I can easily get to does multi-precision
arithmetic on the complex numbers. Also unlikely to be a match.

So there's your problem. Your software is hard to use and hard to find out
about. Get it into distros so that installing it and trying it out is as
painless as possible.

If I don't know it exists or have to hunt around the web for a copy, I'm
unlikely to donate to it.

------
sleepless
Awesome. Thanks a lot! Can we now add SSL to the website please, since VLC
already appeared as attack vector in tools like FinFisher.

~~~
jbk
SSL is already there.

~~~
icebraining
Why doesn't it auto-redirect? (Not a criticism, just curiosity.)

~~~
jbk
IE. But that is soon over.

You should see SSL from Google though.

~~~
pilif
Because of lacking SNI support? You can try an Ajax request or loading a
picture over SSL and then redirect with JS if it doesn't fail. If the SSL site
serves HSTS headers, all SNI supporting browsers will in the future default to
HTTPS independently of the kludgey redirect (because all browsers that support
HSTS also support SNI).

Sure. An unconditional redirect would be better, but that requires a dedicated
IP

~~~
toast0
You can also set the favicon path to https, and put hsts headers on it. No
JavaScript required.

~~~
pilif
But people with old IE won’t get a favicon that way

------
NicoJuicy
I once sollicitaties for a company that did tv streaming for hotels,
everything was based on VLC...

That was amazing to hear!

------
fiokoden
I think there's nothing at all wrong with differentiating into paid and free.
No ads needed.

~~~
KGIII
I think you're right, in that there is nothing wrong with it. But, I believe
their goal is to keep it free as in beer and free as in speech. Noble goals,
indeed.

------
the_common_man
Out of curiosity, what do you think about silicon valley startups :)

------
mikevm
If the software had ads, it'd lose its popularity anyway...

~~~
romanovcode
But you can cash in and leave the software to die like uTorrent authors did
for example.

~~~
agumonkey
Someone suggested that in the AMA. Take the cash, then fork and let users
migrate. OP then used the word "morale".

~~~
bigbugbag
It is not so simple. Many users would be left on the sidelines and the trust
would be damaged forever.

If something like this had happened I would have migrated the machines I
maintain for sure but probably not to the VLC fork.

------
harmlessposter
Why?

VLC is amazing software and I deeply thank you for your efforts :)

~~~
zodiac
> Why?

Click the link to find out! The money was to put in some kind of ads or
sponsored content

------
Numberwang
I've moved on to mpv.io these days, but VLC still holds a special place in my
heart.

~~~
DarkCrusader2
Be sure to check out gnome-mpv if you on gnome and haven't heard of it yet.

------
snakeanus
I fail to see what the problem with accepting ads would be, after all anyone
who did not want the ads could simply fork the software. Even he could make a
ads-free fork. Moreover I am pretty sure that all GNU/Linux distros would
include it without any ads.

Also, he might have refused "refused several tens of millions of € to keep the
software ads free" however he did not mind relicensing VLC for free under a
less copyleft and user-protecting license so that it would be included in the
apple store.

