Why Kempf turned down tens of millions to keep VLC ad-free

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 56:10

   nine gag and yeah yeah i see there's you looking like a wizard in the in the vlc hat on reddit this is uh jb the creator vlc media player he refused tens of millions of dollars in order to keep vlc hats free thanks jean-baptiste kampf you can even summon him on reddit yeah and usually if you see right it's usually like people tag me right and and then there is me and like i say good morning i got 24k upvotes which is great right my karma on reddit is amazing at least on that account um so the question is needs to be answered first what is a story about vlc right um because yes this is true i refuse dozens of millions of dollars yes several times yes i could be a multimillionaire and be somewhere on the beach um but i did not do it because i thought it was not moral and it was not the right thing to do. And this is very important for myself is to

2. 57:11

   be like, I work for the greater good. I work for people and I don't want, it's not just by myself. But the reason is also because I did not feel that I'm completely legitimate to do that. And let me explain you why. VLC story is a very weird story. In France, we have university and we have a type of top colleges, and those top of excellency schools are engineering school, business schools, and basically lawyers and medical, right?

3. 57:43

   But they're outside of university. And in order to enter those, you spend two years working like crazy mass physics to enter those best engineering schools. One of the schools is called the École Centrale Paris. It has changed names since, but it was called the École Centrale Paris. And because it was central, they had to move it because it was too small after the world war ii and and they moved it they wanted to move it to the central of france in a place called clermont ferrand and the alumni decided that this was not okay right it is the school that eiffel right the one who did the eiffel tower attended to right so they said no no we are amazing great school we cannot do that and so they bought a piece of land south of paris uh very near paris um and it was a campus managed by a non-profit of the alumnis okay

4. 58:32

   Because of that, everything on the campus was managed by students. The university did nothing, right? So radio, TV, supermarket, library, defining who was going into which rooms. Everything was managed by the students. That's amazing. That's an amazing experiment that it all didn't go to hell quickly. It somehow flourished. It worked great. And I learned so much in my life doing those side activities, right?

5. 59:01

   Because you're 22 and you need to run your campus else you don't have electricity, right? So you care about that, right? But anyway, in the 80s, they did a full experiment of deploying a network mostly sponsored by IBM and 3Com, which was a token ring network. So Token Ring is something that probably almost no one knows about anymore. It's a networking technology where you don't have routers, right?

6. 59:26

   Everyone is linked. It's like really a ring. And when you want to send a message, you talk to your neighbor who's going to put the message to the next one, who's going to put the things to the next one in terms of ring. The issue with token ring is, of course, is that it's very slow because every computer on the network needs to open the message, see if it's OK. Is it for me? No, it's not. And then send it back like a token, which is traveling around the ring.

7. 59:52

   In the 80s, you're doing some telnet and sending mails as university. That's OK, right? But starts the 90s and the 90s and start video games. And when you have high latency video games, basically you die. Right. So in 1994, 1995, around Doom and Duke Nukem coming around, they want a faster network. So the students go and see the university and say, you know what? We want a faster network. We need to work, also play video games.

8. 1:00:21

   And the university tells them that basically, oh, I'm sorry, we cannot help you because you understand the campus is not ours. You manage it. So do something. And you should see some basically partners of the university and basically go away. And they go and they actually go and see the CIO of Bouygues, which is a large French company and who's doing some TVs in France. And he says, well, you know what? The future of video is satellite.

9. 1:00:52

   Well, today we know it's not, but at least it was a good idea in 1995, the first of satellite dish. And he says that instead of having like one satellite dish and a big decoder for each of the students, which are 1,500, what about you build like you put an enormous dish and only one decoder and you send the video directly on the network and that required a very fast network today it's obvious but at the time was like the first to do video streaming so they built this project which was called network 2000 of course we are in the 90s right everything is futuristic is called 2000 like 2000 yeah And so they do the Network 2000 project.

10. 1:01:34

    It's completely hacked. It crashes after 45 seconds. That's okay. The demo is 40 seconds. It leaks memory. That's okay. They put 64 megabytes of RAM instead of the 8 or 16 you have. And the demo should have stopped there. And that was the Network 2000 project by the students. What was the format of the video that they had to work with? MPEG-2 because satellite is MPEG-2 TS for transport, MPEG-2 video, and MPEG-2 audio at that time.

11. 1:01:59

    And the project should have stopped there. everyone was happy. They had like amazing ATM network at 155 megabits per second. They had probably one of the best network in Europe at that time. And they stopped the project. Six months or a year later, two students arrive and say, well, you know what? Maybe other people care about video streamed on a local network. And they create the VideoLan project VideoLan. And one of them is called Christophe Mathieu. That is a good friend of both Kieran and me. And they start the project.

12. 1:02:30

    it's not even open source yet. And they spent around three years to get the school to agree to make it open source. Because the university wanted to get, because of the IP and copyright of the students, wanted to basically monetize these MPEG-2 decoders. Just to be clear, so what's the main application streaming on a local network? It was streaming on a local network. By the way, this is like, to state the obvious, this is before YouTube, this is before...

13. 1:02:56

    10 years before YouTube. You have a Pentium 60 or 75, right? The main machine was 4886 GX at 33 MHz, right? Bear in mind, television was the main form of video at the time. You could get new channels. In the 90s, having even one new channel, when you grew up with four channels, having a fifth or a sixth was a big deal. And so having this satellite service with, you know, dozens, even hundreds of channels was so groundbreaking.

14. 1:03:21

    Especially because this is a university where you had a ton of different nationalities, right? So there was a ton of people who wanted, so in the end, they had like several dishes on different type of satellite, right? Because, for example, a lot of people were coming from the Maghreb or the Middle East. And so they went to different type of satellites. Anyway, the solution worked great, and they started the VideoLand project.

15. 1:03:45

    The VideoLand project has several, and some are completely crazy solutions, like one, how to create multicast on a unicast network. But let's not come to that. It's too complex. But VideoLand client part is what became VLC. Actually, they basically strong-armed the university to force it to open source because the university did not understand that. And in 2001, it's still early. But basically, yes, the university agreed early 2001 to make it open source.

16. 1:04:16

    I joined the project in 2003 because that's when I joined the university. But the first thing is I'm not the one who created VLC because actually no one did, right? Just kind of naturally emerged from the VideoLand project. And we should mention that, like, again, you said it just to make it clear. video land as what it became was at the time is a set of technologies around video the vlc what you call the client that's the thing that most normies uh that is correct and think of like as the thing which is like the thing that pops up when you click on video and you play it so i arrived in 2003 and then i will create the open source um non-profit organization called video LAN, and I took everything out of the university to create a non-profit project and something sustainable.

17. 1:05:07

    Yes, it's true that I spent more time than anyone on VLC and Video LAN, that is sure. But it's a continuity of a previous project, Video LAN, the student project, which is a continuity of the Network 2000 project, which is a continuity of that and that. I'm sure there's moments along the way there you were thinking, like, what is the future of this from an open source perspective? Because as the internet is blowing up and there is companies, I mean, for people who don't remember, like there's companies making huge amounts of money.

18. 1:05:39

    And I can tell you that in 2005, the project should have died. And I made it to continue the project. At some point, we were only two active developers. And I thought it was great technology and was useful and it will be useful. And I made that my life and my time. And I made that grow from a few hundreds of thousands of users, millions of users to what we have now, which is probably billions of versions of VLC around the world and used everywhere.

19. 1:06:15

    So that's a bit the story of VLC. There is a ton of very funny story around that. Many people from around the world working on it, like you said, in Syria or middle of nowhere in India. But along the way, I got several offers, which were either to bundle toolbars, right? You remember those horrible toolbars, which were basically spyware, or changing your web browser, or your search engine, or even like advertisement inside VLC.

20. 1:06:45

    And I didn't like... that right i am and people don't understand that is not i'm not against money right i'm very happy to make money i created several startups and one i hope that is going to work very well it's the fact that i believe that you need to win money ethically there is the right way of doing that and and doing sneaky advertisement or stealing data is not the correct way right for example if netflix arrived at some point to say well we want to put netflix inside vlc probably the story would have been different, right?

21. 1:07:17

    But they didn't. The only people who came to us were shady ads company. And if I do that, right, I would have a ton of money, right? And then three years later, project is gone, right? Someone forks it and something else happens. So it's not even necessarily ads or any of that. It's the shadiness and the dishonesty of the, so you had a good radar, you had a good threshold of like, no, this compromises the spirit of what this is supposed to represent.

22. 1:07:45

    but also it's, it's for me, right? I'm like very selfishly. I need to go to bed at night and be happy about what I've done. Right. Maybe it's my upbringing. Um, uh, maybe it's my parents' fault or whatever. Right. But I believe there is right and wrong. Right. And this was the right decision at the time. It still is. I want to be proud of what I've been doing. And like, if I had sold out, I would have betrayed so many other people who work.

23. 1:08:13

    Yeah, well, I should say, me and most of the internet, thank you for that decision. It's inspiring for others, I think, that are pushing the open source movement forward, that it's okay to do these kinds of huge sacrifices if you believe it's right. And I think in that case, it was right. And it was the reason that VLC became as successful as it was, because it's an embodiment. And it's a symbol of freedom and what the open source community can create.

24. 1:08:46

    Yeah, and be a service for so many people around the world. And this is important. We should emphasize in the 2000s, it was really normal to download a program and it secretly installs some spyware. It was buried in very faint text or in the license text box that nobody reads at the bottom. Oh, I will be installing this toolbar and changing all these things. And it was, it was very common to have to, you know, you install a program to do something at the time of any sort.

25. 1:09:11

    To put yourself in the mind of a developer at that time, I think it's very easy to everybody listening to this. It's very easy at that time to convince yourself to take a few thousand dollars, a few thousand dollars to do it, to say no to much more money takes guts and takes vision. the last offer i had was obscene and they say yeah but imagine with all that money you could build something new open source right it was like the mind trick was it was difficult but for me it was just like no this doesn't work like that or this is not the right thing so i don't do it and again right it's not that i don't like money or whatever it's just like it wasn't right Well, once again, thank you From me and from the rest of the internet Let me talk a little bit more About the open source movement About the fact that, as you say

26. 1:10:10

    Over and over and over and over FFmpeg