VLC Built Free Rejected Millions Stayed Clean | Generated by AI

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Question: Who built VLC? And who rejected investing to keep it ad-free?

Answer:

VLC media player was originally developed as a student project called “VideoLAN Client” starting in 1996 by students at École Centrale Paris (a French engineering school). It began as part of the larger VideoLAN project to stream and play MPEG-2 content over the campus network. The software was rewritten from scratch in 1998 and released under the GNU GPL in 2001.

Over time, development shifted from the university to a global community of contributors. In 2008–2009, Jean-Baptiste Kempf (a major contributor since his student days) founded and leads the non-profit VideoLAN organization to coordinate and support the project independently. While VLC is a community effort (not built by one single person), Jean-Baptiste Kempf is widely recognized as a key figure: he is the president of VideoLAN, a lead developer, and often referred to in media as the “creator” or driving force behind VLC’s ongoing success and direction.

Regarding rejecting investment/offers to keep it ad-free: Jean-Baptiste Kempf (on behalf of VideoLAN) has publicly stated that he turned down multiple lucrative offers — reportedly in the range of tens of millions of euros/dollars — from companies wanting to add advertisements, bloatware, tracking, paid features, or otherwise monetize VLC. He rejected these to preserve VLC as completely free, open-source, ad-free, tracker-free, and user-respecting software. VideoLAN funds the project primarily through voluntary user donations rather than ads or corporate deals.

This decision has helped maintain VLC’s reputation as one of the most trusted and widely used media players (with billions of downloads) without compromising its principles.

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