What Jean-Baptiste Kempf has said about Open source licensing

1 quote · 1 episode · May 6, 2026

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, French software engineer, president of VideoLAN and lead developer of VLC media player, has been quoted on Open source licensing once in 1 episode of Lex Fridman Podcast, most recently on May 6, 2026. Each quote below is verbatim and links to the moment it was said.

In their words

Kempf said relicensing libVLC from GPL to LGPL required personally tracking down more than 350 individual contributors because copyright remains with each author.
“if you want to properly re-license, you need to find all the contributors. And at that time, I had to contact more than 350 people”
Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 53:07

Episodes

#496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet
Lex Fridman Podcast · May 6, 2026 · 4 h 24 min
Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya explain FFmpeg, VLC, video codecs, handwritten assembly, open-source maintainer burnout and the Google security drama with Lex Fridman.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf on other topics

FFmpeg · 3 quotes
VLC media player · 3 quotes
Video patents and patent pools · 1 quote
Kyber (low-latency streaming SDK) · 1 quote
Open source maintainer burnout · 1 quote
Rust (programming language) · 1 quote
AV1 · 1 quote
dav1d · 1 quote