VLC’s core developer and VideoLAN president, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, was awarded the European SFS Award this year at Italy’s premier free software conference.
During opening day activities on Friday at this year’s SFSCON in Bolzano, Italy, the president and lead developer of the popular open source VLC media player, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, was awarded this year’s European SFS Award 2025.
If you haven’t heard of either SFSCON or the SFS Award, you’re not alone. I also had to look them up, and now that I have, I’m pretty sure that both are going to be on most open sourcers’ radar in the future. Actually, the conference should have already been on my radar: it’s been around since 2001, but like many of us here in the US, I sometimes have blinders on when it comes to happenings in other countries.
SFSCON is an annual free software event that takes place in Bolzano, Italy, usually in November. The European SFS Award is a rather new honor that’s presented annually at SFSCON to individuals who have made outstanding, sustained contributions to advancing free software across Europe.
Established in 2023 by the Linux User Group Bolzano-Bozen-Bulsan in partnership with the Free Software Foundation Europe, the inaugural 2023 award went to Frank Karlitschek, for his efforts as a co-founder and the CEO of Nextcloud. Last year the award went posthumously to Bram Moolenaar, the creator and long-time maintainer of the popular text editor Vim, who died in August 2023 at the age of 62.
About VLC
While a lot of FOSS Force visitors might know VLC as Larry the Linux Guy’s (that would be Larry Cafiero who writes our Distro of the Week column) favorite media player, anybody who’s been using Linux for more than a year or two will know it as one of the longest running apps available for desktop Linux, good for playing both physical media like CDs, DVDs, and the like, as well as media files saved locally.
From a home computing perspective, it’s been around for half of forever — or since 1996. Over the years it evolved into an all-in-one media player. It continues to evolve, and like a fine wine, it has only gotten better with age.
It started as a student project at a French school — École Centrale Paris — by a group of students who needed a way to stream and play videos across their campus network. Known as VideoLAN, it began with the development of the VideoLAN Client (VLC) and the VideoLAN Server (VLS), later evolving into the highly popular open source VLC media player that’s still popular today. In 2002, the project was opened to broader developer contributions and released under the GPL.
“For many people running non-free operating systems, it was the very first free software they ever installed,” Matthias Kirschner, the president of FSFE said during the award ceremony. “For many people running Free Software, it saved them from installing and booting into a proprietary operating system.”
And the Winner Is…
Joining the project as a student developer around 2005, Jean-Baptiste Kempf took the reins sometime around 2008 when the project risked being shut down because the original developers were graduating. About the same time, he founded the VideoLAN non-profit to steward VLC’s development after it separated from the school.
“I am extremely honored to receive the European SFS Award,” Kemp said when accepting the award. “The free software multimedia community is quite niche and unknown, but we work hard so that video content can be free, can be played, and processed. The work done around the VideoLAN community has been tremendous, despite its little resources. I want to thank the whole VideoLAN and FFmpeg teams, who spend their time on those projects, often with little recognition.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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