VLC is open source. The moment the author invites sponsors, more new forks happen. Moreover, the claim of ‘tens of million’ is likely an accumulated number. The author has but one chance to sell the software, so there wasn’t that much money at the first place.
On the forks aspect, FOSS culture hasn’t quite got things abstracted enough here. Yes, forks would happen but a lot of value would be destroyed in a sale of the upstream. Our goal should be to make it totally pointless and that’s usually best done with copyleft and many copyright holders. Apt sources could also be more fluid and reputation aware about which repo they distribute from.
VLC is open source. The moment the author invites sponsors, more new forks happen. Moreover, the claim of ‘tens of million’ is likely an accumulated number. The author has but one chance to sell the software, so there wasn’t that much money at the first place.
But after all, thanks for all the effort.
On the forks aspect, FOSS culture hasn’t quite got things abstracted enough here. Yes, forks would happen but a lot of value would be destroyed in a sale of the upstream. Our goal should be to make it totally pointless and that’s usually best done with copyleft and many copyright holders. Apt sources could also be more fluid and reputation aware about which repo they distribute from.