Jean-Baptiste Kempf

FFmpeg is probably one of the biggest CPU users in the world. Everything we’ve just said in the past couple of minutes, every sentence is someone’s lifetime’s work. There are books about every sentence. So the level of complexity in many cases is inordinate.

He’s very harsh, but what people don’t see is usually when he’s harsh, it’s to people who are maintainers of part of the kernel, right? So they know him, right? So he’s not very harsh like that to everyone. The thing is, what he created in his room is basically powering every server online, right? Even at Microsoft’s cloud called Azure, I’m quite sure seventy, eighty percent of the servers are running Linux. All your Android phones are running Linux. What he did with the power of open source, sure, is amazing. And yes, the quality of the Linux kernel is very high, and yes, it’s difficult, but we cannot compromise on that. We cannot compromise on quality because in the end—and you have to understand that—the core community of VLC is five people. But we should also mention that there is some spiciness, some harshness to the language that’s sometimes used when you’re keeping this high bar of excellence. Is there something to say to that?

And what’s the definition of compromise? Like allowing a government to do a backdoor- I move to, I don’t know, Cayman Islands, and I change the domain name, and I start again, right? Like, VLC is a tool. It’s a tool that is going to help people doing things. We are not a platform. And for patents, well, I’m sorry, but most of the patents… Like, you shouldn’t be able to patent math and matrices. Like, this is wrong.