https://www.protocol.com/vlc-history-open-source
"When students at the École Centrale Paris lobbied for a campus network
upgrade in the '90s, they weren't really thinking about the future of
media. All they wanted was to play Duke Nukem 3D. But the public-private
partnership that made the first-person shooter work on their campus
network also laid the groundwork for the birth of the popular media
player VLC.
Open sourced 20 years ago this month, VLC has since been downloaded more
than 3.5 billion times, making it one of the most popular free software
projects to date. Software developed for VLC is being used to power some
of the world's largest streaming services. Despite all of this, VLC has
largely remained a labor of love, with developers saying no to deals
worth tens of millions of dollars.
The story of VLC is about geeks pursuing their passion projects,
fighting back countless legal threats and hatching a baffling plan to
send Bitcoins to the moon."
Via Hank G, who wrote "This is my favorite movie player because it works
well on all my desktop platforms including all Linux and various BSDs. I
first discovered it in 2005 working on a networking simulation project
where we needed to illustrate streaming video. Great history."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
