There is a lot of information Out There. So much, that the business of searching and sorting it has given rise to Google (our host) and many rivals. So, I suppose it should come as no surprise to me that I am somewhere around the 65 millionth downloader of the VLC Media Player.
As there is only one of me, and I spend a lot of time in the conventional Open Source arena, looking at business solutions. I am trying to get folks interested in more mundane scabbed-edge technology, and beg to be excused for not being up on streaming audio and video and everything related to it. When urged to get the VLC (http://www.videolan.org) by my son-at-college, I went right out and did so. In the media arena, this thing is the slicer-dicer-food processor of the video/audio world, offering us formats and data that will take weeks just to learn to spell the acronyms. But, enough shameless promotion. As an Open Source Zealot, I also tried to get an idea of who they are and what they are about.
The core team are French developers. Unlike a lot of French Open Source folks, they have an English language website; I have yet to find anything in French. I found an Impress presentation that they gave at FOSDEM several years ago that gave a great overview of the product and what VLC are about. Near the end of the presentation, while they were outlining where they wanted the product to go and what they were thinking (and asking for Laborers in the Harvest), there was a single bullet:
World Domination
Hey, you have to respect this. A lofty goal, as their product is not autoloaded with the operating system, and folks have to look for it. Respect them, we should. As the 65 millionth-or-so user of their product, I don't think I have any other choice.
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