291–300 of 318 posts
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25 FTEs is an incredible achievement, and you should be very proud. The rewards are enormous - VideoLAN has a massive impact on human culture, more so than 99% of all businesses. Taking on VC to "grow" may be difficult, but is it something you really need to do? What you've built is amazing, and if you can sustain it at its current size, you'd be doing wonderful work. Endlessly chasing growth is a fool's errand, and…
> 25 FTEs is an incredible achievement, and you should be very proud. I know this is a stupid question, but I tried googling and it wasn't obvious... what does FTE stand for? "Full Time Equivalent?" Does that mean they are paying for 25 full time employees?
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There is the MacArthur Foundation with its "Genius Award." Richard Stallman was one of the Fellows in its 1990 class. If I recall correctly, the award was for $100K a year for 5 years, no strings attached. https://www.macfound.org/fellows/412/
one winner per year.... yeah, that's not a lot.
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Man, VLC, you and the 25 FTE you created in a sustainable way are much more impressive to me than any Uber, Facebook or other hockey stick growth giant. You folks rock, and thanks for that
Agreed - and we don't do enough to support groups like this. I would totally by VLC branded swag. Coffee cup, underwear, "I supported VLC and all I got was this t-shirt"... etc... Or maybe stuff more on brand, like bluetooth ear buds or something? Lots of good will to be had by such a giant fan-base. EDIT: Looks like they're already thinking about that. Hope they launch before xmas! http://www.videolan.org/goodies.ht…
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But the IRS isn't aware of what deductions you have and what credits you qualify for until you tell them. This completely changes your tax liability. When you actually understand the system , it makes sense why it is the way it is.
But what are those based on? Do you really need to reenter/recalculate them each year? Countries like Estonia prefill the tax filing and they say somewhere above 90% of people don't need to make any changes when they file. Most people file within the first day and get their rebate within less than a week. If you had no significant changes (eg opened foreign bank accounts or sjmjlsr) you likely have no need to change…
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This response reminds me of: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1258531455220609025 Opensource/free software powers most of the stuff we take for granted. The software and their maintainers are equally taken-for-granted.
I agree that the vast majority of people take a lot of open source for granted. However, a lot of open source projects are, frankly, extremely rude to users. Instead of some copy-paste "kindly please direct your question to this resource over here" the users get "GET THE @#%% OUT OF HERE STUPID N00b" and this is from people directly with the project (e.g., domain email address). If you think this doesn't impact your…
FOSS projects are just a reversal of the roles. They let the creators react more honestly. You're not a paying customer, so don't expect to be treated as if you were the developer's boss.
I've been working on VideoLAN (VLC, x264, other...) for most of my professional life. For a long time, I had other jobs, working at startups around video, and doing VLC at nights and weekends and holidays. And now, I built a couple of companies around Open Source multimedia, where we do consulting, integration, custom development around software, applications development, licensing, support and so on. Those companies…
VLC is one of those rare pieces of software that seems to play every single thing you throw at it, and just do it smoothly. I know whenever something fails, "VLC will play it" – and that's the advice I give if someone asks me how to open a file that isn't mp4, etc. Thanks for an awesome project and I am actually happy to hear that you have 25 people and what seems to be a sustainable business.
Sustainability is another way to say subsistence. The dirty secret of open source is that much of it is powered by maintainer guilt. If you’re looking to make money, I don’t recommend you get into open source. I wish this weren’t the case, but this is the current situation. Unfortunately, it seems the best path if you want to do open source as a career is to do enough open source to get your name out there and then l…
This. Can't stress points 2 and 3 enough. Remember Segment [1], one of YC's most successful companies, started out as a small open source tool on Github. But even though it was small and had basically no features, the enterprise loved it and asked for more. That's how they realized that they hit a nerve. So writing and releasing OSS may not lead to direct monetization opportunities, but it can be a great way to get i…
Their website doesn't seem to mention that in any way. :/
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Another thing with successful open source projects is that people dedicate their whole lives to it - don't you think you'd enjoy more if you had worked on lots of different projects, tech, companies, etc... instead of "just" VLC? For how long do you plan to continue working on it? There's a whole world outside video playback - do you happen to think about this time to time?
> don't you think you'd enjoy more if you had worked on lots of different projects, tech, companies, etc... instead of "just" VLC? Well, to be honest, I'd love to extend what we're doing in VLC to other end-user applications like PDF reader, or the basic apps you have on Android and iOS.