"Well, it's important to remind people that we don't make money out of VLC and that there is no business model around it, we're not Mozilla or Facebook. VideoLAN only receives donations and that's not enough to hire someone. VLC developers are either volunteers (the majority since VLC started) or have their consulting business around open source multimedia."
Good point: there is plenty of software where people have no issues with buying a new licence every couple of years,
Compare that to (in my case) sixteen years of happy VLC usage across many different computers and phones, and it's obvious that I have some donations to catch up on!
I naively thought free projects were as resistant as VLC when it comes to manipulation for the sake of money, but big and even often cheered ones gave in.
A bad business model can be worse than having none.
Out of curiosity, have you considered monetization strategies like an open pay-per-video store? VLC is awesome, and I kind of wish it got the monetary compensation it deserves hah. I've heard that indie movie distribution is a dreadful space.
Certainly no expert in the field here, but maybe a store/market built around vimeo's "on demand" stuff? A partnership with vimeo whereby VLC would get a % of sales when purchased via VLC might help both parties (more exposure to vimeo via VLC, revenue for VLC, etc).
"When you buy a VOD, you will be able to stream its videos for as long as they remain on Vimeo. If the seller allows, you will also be able to download the videos to your computer and devices, DRM-free."
What is annoying is many groups like this make it hard for us that have employers that will match donations for non-profits to donate.
I tried to get OpenBSD added to our companies system awhile back but the group that manages that process said they did not get a response from the OpenBSD group when they reached out to them to get a bit of information.
I can (and do) donate outside of my companies process, but they are missing out on additional money.
* Recurring SEPA transfer? (Europe-only AFAICT)
* Use their Paypal link, see if you can enable recurring payment there? (I'm not familiar with this though)
Thanks for the link. It had honestly not occurred to me to donate before. VLC has been around for so long, and has always worked well, been unobtrusive, and made so few unnecessary changes, that I have taken it for granted. I wish I could say the same for other open source software, then I might donate to them too.
Why donations via Paypal? Paypal sucks and steals! They make up their own (totally unreasonable) rates for exchanging Euro's to USD..
Better show an Ethereum address or so, it's just a few minutes work and might render a much larger donation due to the expected increase in price over time.
Paypal is "easy" to setup and maintain for many donation type cases like this, and provides an incredibly low barrier for entry to accept donations, this low barrier of entry can easily make up (to the developers) for the skimming done by paypal with fees and bad currency conversions. Also keep in mind that people in europe are likely not converting to USD when donating, the VLC non-profit is europe based so there's likely not a conversion there happening. It's going to happen USD to Euro though. And if that's still a concern, you can also do a direct bank transfer in europe pretty easily as they provide that information, making it without fees for a lot of EU citizens.
And while they don't have an Ethereum address, they do have bitcoin and monero, two of the biggest players in this space. It would be nice to see more options just so that one could use whatever cryptocurrency is going to have lower transaction fees at the time.
maybe because a lot of the potential people you might want to donate actually use paypal?
there's already monero and bitcoin donation addresses there, but paypal is something most people already know about and can deal with (from multiple currencies around the globe).
I've downloaded a couple of hundreds of euros last year to various open source and Internet advocacy projects, and I've always used PayPal to do so.
I love the projects I've donated to, but not enough to trust them all not to fuck up storing my banking info. This way, I have all my donations easily available via one interface that I don't use for much else.
"Well, it's important to remind people that we don't make money out of VLC and that there is no business model around it, we're not Mozilla or Facebook. VideoLAN only receives donations and that's not enough to hire someone. VLC developers are either volunteers (the majority since VLC started) or have their consulting business around open source multimedia."