Jean-Baptiste Kempf is president of VideoLAN and a principal developer of VLC and FFmpeg. VLC has been downloaded more than 6.5 billion times and runs with no advertisements and no tracking. He repeatedly refused acquisition and advertising deals worth millions of dollars to preserve the project’s integrity, reasoning that accepting shady partnerships would fund a few years of his life at the cost of the project itself. When two intelligence agencies separately asked him to insert backdoors into VLC, he refused — and describes being ‘a lot less polite’ than simply saying no. He has co-founded companies around low-level multimedia infrastructure, building on the FFmpeg/VLC ethos of handwritten assembly and volunteer craftsmanship.
Speaker