In the late 1990s, at École Centrale Paris, a group of engineering students set out to solve a small problem — streaming videos across their university campus. Among them was Jean-Baptiste Kempf, a young programmer with a quiet determination and a vision far beyond his years.
The project was called VideoLAN Client, later shortened to three letters that would change digital media forever: VLC. It started as a campus tool — open-source, student-built, free for anyone to use. But what they didn’t realize at the time was that they were building something that would one day sit on nearly every computer on Earth.
Back then, watching a video on a computer was frustrating. You needed special codecs, specific players, endless downloads. VLC didn’t care about any of that. It played everything — clean, fast, simple. No ads. No paywalls. No nonsense.
When Jean-Baptiste took over the project after graduation, he faced a choice that would define not just his career, but a philosophy. Corporations came knocking — big ones. They offered him tens of millions to commercialize VLC, to add advertisements, to make it “profitable.” He refused every time.
“Software should serve people,” he once said in an interview. “Not the other way around.”
That belief became the heart of VLC. Under Kempf’s leadership, the project remained open-source, sustained by volunteers and community contributors from around the globe. He wasn’t interested in profit — he was building trust.
Over the decades, while other platforms crumbled under corporate weight, VLC quietly became a universal symbol of integrity in tech. It now has billions of downloads, runs on every operating system imaginable, and still costs exactly zero.
And that orange-and-white traffic cone icon? It wasn’t a marketing design — it was a joke. A relic from those university nights when students, after long coding sessions, would “collect” traffic cones on their way back from parties. What began as a student prank became one of the most recognizable logos in the digital world.
In an industry obsessed with monetization, Jean-Baptiste Kempf chose principle over profit.
Today, when you open VLC and play a video without a single ad or pop-up, you’re not just using a media player — you’re touching a legacy built on stubborn goodness. A reminder that not all innovation comes from greed. Some comes from belief — that access, simplicity, and freedom belong to everyone.