What a good dude

Gonna be real honest here, I would have taken that in a heartbeat. It's an open source project, I could disappear with my money and the project could be continued from a different fork without ads. The only thing you're really sacrificing is your reputation and with enough money I don't care.
- and with enough money I don't care.
  Most people are like you.
  Which is precisely why humanity will be just another of many dead end evolutionary cul-de-sacs in Earth's natural history.
  I've come to peace with that, but this is a nice microcosm of the core reason. We can do better, we know better, but at the end of the day, almost all of us will just take the animalistic dopamine rush of winning.
  Live together or die alone. We choose the second one like breathing.
  If most humans were like Kempf (we're not), we'd actually have a chance.
  
  I don't think this hypothetical is about winning so much as never having to worry about your needs being met again. The calculus changes completely for a lot of people (not optimistic enough to say most) if that's not part of the equation.
  
  That is a very western, independent cultural paradigm you have there. Western culture and values are not shared by everyone in the west let alone all humanity.
  Only a few of us have strong narcissistic and anti-social personality traits, but they are vocal and usually end up in positions of power.
  I would argue the vast majority of humanity throughout history is more selfless and willing to sacrifice and work towards a goal than you give us credit for. Look at the big picture and think about how much innovation has come from a place not driven by profit potential but for THE potential to go further.
  
  Okay but why would we all take the money? Because we want to be rich? Or because we need to be rich in order to live a comfortable life?
  
  This is what happens when you let an arbitrary system of resource management based on strife and competition govern your society top-down.
  Making everyone compete for resources against one another in an abstract version of Hunger Games is not going to lead to good results.
  If you decree a global law that says that everyone is to compete against one another in a zero sum game for resources, in perpetuity, and that law remains in full effect for generations upon generations, people will go insane. The algorithm programs us as well as we program it- "amass, forever" is not a great command to issue just in general with no other conditions or parameters, especially without a goal state. You don't just "program", you create a program that is to achieve some result.
  If the only game in the world was soccer, and everyone in the world had to play, at all times, at the risk of dying if they don't, they will start conceptualizing their whole reality around soccer, and soccer will at some point supersede reality- it will become reality.
  I like to ask people- "in a thousand years, if humanity is still around, do you think we will still be living under a capitalist system?". By far the most common response is more or less yes, and furrowed eyebrows. I find that most people are incapable of entertaining even the thought of an alternative. Not because they're stupid or ignorant, but because the thought would never occur to them, like if one were asking a fish to imagine a replacement for water, it's just beyond the scope of imagination bordering on the purely metaphysical.
  
  Definitely team Hurley here
- And that's why your picture isn't on the front page of Lemmy 2day!
  
  I think I would manage.
  
  My picture already isn't there every day. I'd rather have my picture still not there AND a few millions in my account...
- Almost the best of both worlds right?
  Creator gets a huge payout, well deserved. Users install VLC, see ads, exit, search web for “VLC ads”, see the fork, re-install having wasted 2-3 minutes total. Eventually “VLC Origin” is the only one anybody talks about.
  Those who can stomach ads don’t bother finding the ad-free version, and still use great software. Even the advertisers win.
  (This assumes no abusive telemetry / spyware.)
  
  Could even use the money for new open source projects or for funding the VLC fork.
- Who needs a reputation when you have money ! I'd do the same , hopefully he is atleast not broke.
  
  Well, with enough money you can buy a better reputation!
- I would take the money, put ads in the installer, but warn everyone about them and link them to another repo with an ad-free installer. I would also constantly slander the company
- Firefox is like this in fact, just put the option to deactivate or fork open source and everyone is happy.

I moved away from VLC because of the somewhat boring UI. Then I used potplayer, then I discovered MPV - which is awesome because it's so performant you can easily customize it.
But I think VLC helped pioneer the library that allows decoding and playing videos without the mess that were video codec drivers on desktop.
- If I try to play 3 random videos in VLC, they all three will play perfectly. If I try those same three on anything else, at least one of them will be buggy in some way.
  Yes you can argue there could be encoding problems in the video file of that buggy one, but somehow VLC just always works. Shit's unbelievably good, so I won't be switching.
  
  I remember the first time I encountered the Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) media type which ultimately lead me to downloading VLC as it was the only player that could handle it at the time
  
  Sadly i recently learned VLC doesn't just always work.
  About a year ago i had an issue with playing FLAC files on VLC, where there would be short periods of no audio. I had recently made some upgrades to my audio hardware, so i was looking at my new hardware/cables/config.... but in the end i realized it always happened at the same point in the same files, so a software issue was more likely:
  https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/27696
  Nice quote from this issue: VLC is broken since months Use their nightly version, it has a nice new interface too, and no bugs. I don't get how they can keep a huge breaking bug like this in vlc from MONTHS.
  And neither can i... until a year ago VLC was for me the pinnacle of "it just works". Now after them leaving a bug causing audio playback issues into their stable version for months, they broke my trust in them... they're probably still the best option out there, but now i'll just say probably, not for sure, and there is room for improvement...
  And if it were some obscure format, sure, but FLAC? ....
  
  Not a 4K movie.
  edit: the only reason I switched from VLC to potplayer was because VLC couldn't play my 2160p videos
  
  How many porn videos do you need to watch simultaneously?
- MPC-HC and MPV both rock, but VLC will always stay on all my machines because any time I have a problem with a video file, VLC opens that shit no issue.
  
  I can trust VLC as software. Trust is a rare thing to have for any software these days.
- As of right now VLC also doesn't properly support Wayland, but MPV does. It's a great piece of software!
  Agree on the sentiment about VLC though, having an open source project demonstrate what is possible and stand the test of time definitely paves the way for future work and improvements.
- I still have PTSD from those codec-install-infested-times.... God bless VLC and it's Author / Creator!
  
  Boo!
- Still mpv's gpu-next video output driver is based on VLC's libplacebo.
  VLC is really slow to integrate their own development efforts though, VLC media player 4.0 has been in beta for years..
  
  Dude should try adding some ads to the program to generate some income to spend on more dev time...
- Why does the UI matter for a video player? It’s not like you’re looking at it when the video is playing. How odd. I’ve been using VLC for years, I like that it doesn’t change. It just cracks on and plays the video, which is what you want in a video player. Isn’t it?
  It’s the Tunnock’s Teacake of apps.
- I rarely ever use vlc but i almost always have it installed just in case something doesn’t work. It has never let me down.
- I tried to like MPV, I just can't, potplayer lets me easily customize the subtitles so easily.
- Vlc has many custom ui that you can download. And the current default isn't that bad either.
- I moved away from VLC because compared to MPC-HC, VLC was super slow. If only MPC-HC could come to Linux, that would be amazing.
  
  MPC comes with those inexplicable keybindings, and it's a hassle setting them, as far as I remember. Or it lacked some deal breaking customization option for me, some stuff is essential.

I paid $ as a donation for VLC. For the decades of use I’ve gotten out of it I felt I had to. Same for a couple other useful apps that have been free for a long time or very useful. I wasn’t able to afford much in years past, but now I can chip in. Hope this helps these devs keep the stuff free, nothing much worse than seeing a beloved FOSS close doors on users and demand fees.
- I can't afford health care but I appreciate VLC and people who support it. All I can give is a God bless and thank you!

Lol they made the VLC logo a real thing.
- I've even seen it on roads. Love that the DOT supports free software.
- Damn if dev sold vlc merch I would buy it in a heartbeat
- Logo was based on a real thing.
  
  c/whoooosh
  
  Preuve moi ça

Seriously the best player. I've installed it on literally every personal computer I owned. I should make a donation.
- One of the few I've gone out of my way to donate to. It's them, Internet Archive, Wikipedia and RiffTrax.

lol and people think Andrew "no chin" Tate is alpha. He is not even an epsilon next to this guy (or next to a person randomly drawn from the population for that matter)
- Tate is a cuniform letter.

I FUCKIN LOVE THIS MAN, THOUGH I’VE NEVER MET HIM.
WE LIVE IN A FUCKING SOCIETY!
- You feel things very deeply my friend. I applaud you

vlc it really whips the llamas ass
- Wasn't that for Winamp tho?
  
  The king is dead; long live the king.
- ...with a traffic cone
- really whips the llamas ass
  
  suddenly im back in uni
- Do you think peta ever used winamp? That would be pretty funny

Remember to donate to open-source projects!

😇 He's the opposite of Spez! 😈

VLC is a genuinely great piece of software.

Protect this Man at any cost.

This post reminded me to support the project.
Donated 15$.

Its GPL anyways. If he ever does accept, it would be sad but not a catastrophe.

Looking forward to VLC 4. It (the beta) can handle playlists that are like 2000-4000 entries long in a second vs VLC3 which has a parser that is slow like molasses.
it's been 2-3 years and my usecase has changed, but it would be great to see this backported to vlc3.
- What anime are you watching that requires a playlist that large? I only assume it's an anime because what else could possibly have 2000-4000 episodes?
  
  I was assuming audio tracks rather than video.
  
  Nah, not anime. It's not playlists of a single thing is all I'll really say about it.
  
  even anime honestly doesn't typically get that big, I think the only one that maybe gets there is Dragonball? like, all of Dragonball. One Piece will probably end up there, but it just broached the 1000 mark recently.

I imagine he always wears this hat in public.
- Thats not a hat thats just how his head is

Les vrais héros ne portent pas de cape.
- Que?
  
  Qui*

Thanks Jean-Baptiste!! You and VLC are Awesome!!

And a converting tool to boot

Where does this traffic cone come from? And where do I get that hat??
- Side of the highway. Just grab one from a road construction site. They're free!
  
  This is more of a correct answer than you'd think.
  https://web.archive.org/web/20220331124436/http://nanocrew.net/2005/06/23/vlc-cone/
  
  Hey, it's not a good night unless you get a traffic cone.
- Very Little Cone

I don't understand why not take the money and make a new kind of vlc just a little different to comply
- Buy-outs often come with non-compete clauses.
  
  It’s open source. Anyone could fork it.
- Yeah, but he has integrity as it seems. He just says no, then there arent any bottom text attached to it. Plus we can see that his intentions are pure, no compromises.

I like his hat

Thanks Jean!

The hero we need.

À true hero. Go strong Jean Baptiste !

Ah, a fellow nerd, I see.

Irl saints do exist!? :-D

Thanks to him

Why is their logo a traffic cone ? 😅
I love VLC and use it almost everyday :)

I'd take the money but use it to help the homeless and such
- I'd buy a lamb chevi
- I'd take the money and use it to fund the most hedonistic and shallow lifestyle possible but I'd keep the software open source.

Mpc is better
- I just keep them both installed and without any tweaking I can play any filetype in existence, and several that are not.
- While VLC has a larger community and thus they want to put ads on it, the author rejects to do that. That’s the point of this post.
- Isn't MPC dead now?
  
  There is an updated fork. It also has great support for downloading subtitles - D shortcut
  
  No
- They're both free, you don't have to choose and can have them both! Not everything needs to be compared and ranked.

should have taken the money.

- It doesn't even have an email client!
  
  How can we add AI in some shape or form?
- It's a free software have some respect
- I believe it's open source and considering their cross-platform focus I can imagine they're a bit wary of adding functionality that might break on one of those or requires maintenance.
  It's possible to contribute though and seem to require an agreement before merging stuff.
  If all else fails you could at least create a fork where you add that basic functionality.
- Ah come on. Think of all the good free software that sold out. This is a video player that's cross platform, is a simple install with no additional drivers required, and has kept up with video standards as they've progressed over the years. it doesn't have ads or bloatware or "premium" subscription.
  Okay dev may have slowed or stopped and that's a shame but we have gotten a damn good deal so far.
  And if VLC isn't to your liking there are good alternatives.