VideoLAN, in a blog post: The VideoLAN project and the VideoLAN non-profit organization are happy to celebrate today the 20th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the project. VideoLAN originally started as a project from the Via Centrale Reseaux student association, after the successful Network 2000 project. But the true release of the project to the world was on 1st of February 2001, the Ecole Centrale Paris director, Mr. Gourisse, allowed the open-sourcing of the whole VideoLAN project under the GNU GPL. This open sourcing concerned all the software developed by the VideoLAN project, including VideoLAN Client, VideoLAN Server, VideoLAN Bridge, VideoLAN Channel Switcher, but also libraries to decode DVDs, like libdca, liba52 or libmpeg2. At that time, this was a risky decision for the Ecole Centrale Paris, and the VideoLAN project is very grateful.

Since then, the project evolved to become a French non-profit organization, and continued developing numerous solutions around the free software multimedia world. Today, VLC media player is used regularly by hundreds of millions of users, and has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times over the years. VLC is today available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android (including TV and Auto versions), iOS (and AppleTV), OS/2 and BSD. Over the years, around 1000 volunteers worked to make VLC a reality.

of this story at Slashdot.

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Source:: Slashdot