The Story of the Best Free App Ever Made

The Story of the Best Free App Ever Made

The journey of a student project transforming into one of the most popular open-source applications without even generating wealth for its creators.

You use lots of apps on your mobile and on your computer. Some of them are free in the sense you did not pay anything but all of the apps have profits in mind. However, there is one app that defies the norm. Created by a group of passionate geeks that did not care much about money, just to make the world a better place. This is their inspiring story. Plus if you read this article till the end you will get a useful howto.

It all began in Paris in the 90’s. Students in the École Centrale Paris university wanted a network upgrade for more Internet bandwidth for their homework assignments, online games (Duke Nukem anyone?!) and of course nsfw activities. Their online activities caused the university network to struggle. However the university did not have the funds for a network upgrade. Instead it decided to find an outside sponsor, a TV channel for “TV online”. The goal is for the channel signal to end up in student’s computers digitally. To accomplish this project students developed a video server and a media player. The project was a success and the initial developers decide to open source the code.

In 2001 the project was renamed as VLC.

It became really popular when the code was ported for the operating systems Windows and MacOS. The main reason that it became so popular was because it just worked. People that tried back then to use Windows media player or Quicktime can remember how much they struggled with codecs and patches until they got their videos working.

In 2009 the project had already 100 million downloads and the developers decided to create an organisation to support activities. One of these activities was to bounce of all of those lawsuits (mostly from the USA) regarding patent violations. All of them failed since they were not easily enforceable in Europe and of course the VLC team had developed the whole code from scratch. One of the activities that the organisation never pursued was how to attract more money.

VLC could make lots of money in many different ways. It had a fanatic user base to support it. Many different companies approached the organisation. They were ready to give away millions to include their applications to VLC. The organisation declined all offers. They wanted VLC to remain pure. Throughout its journey, VLC had remained a labor of passion, with its developers turning down deals worth millions of dollars. Instead VLC got support in the form of donations.

Today, VLC has around 1M downloads per day. It runs literally anywhere. To different operating systems and to different devices. VLC succeeded because of the ethos that was agreed early. Do things because they are fun and keep them pure.