Jean-Baptiste Kempf receiving the European SFS Award 2025 at SFSCON, Bolzano (Picture by NOI Techpark - Marco Parisi CC-BY-SA 4.0. )
End of last week, in Bolzano, during SFSCON 2025, I had the honour of receiving the European SFS Award 2025, presented by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Linux User Group Bolzano (LUGBZ).
This award recognises the work accomplished around the VideoLAN and the VLC community over the past two decades (yes, I’m old now), to build some of the most widely used Free Software tools in the world, trusted by hundred of millions of users.
You can read the official announcement on FSFE website
A Collective Achievement
I welcome the award, on the behalf of our VideoLAN community; a small, unique, underfunded, extremely technical community, but whose collective work powers all video online.
It’s important that this recognition is not mine alone. It belongs to all the developers, contributors, translators, testers and supporters who have helped make VLC what it is today: a free, open, and reliable media player that empowers users everywhere, and ensures that media can remain free forever.
VLC has had more than 1000 people working on the project, since the begginning of the project, and it became popular because of so many people added more fomats, more codecs and a few touches of features.
A special thanks also goes to the VideoLabs team, who continue to be the biggest development force around the VLC.
Why It Matters for our community
As some of you know, the VideoLAN project is more than just VLC. VideoLAN does encoders (x264, decoders (dav1d), the free DVD stack, the free Bluray stack, a player SDK (libVLC and other bindings), but also infrastructure like mirrorbits.
VideoLAN continue the fight for media freedom, interoperability, against patents and DRM.
VLC began as a small student project and grew into a global example of what true open source community can achieve through collaboration.
This award is a reminder that innovation can start from anywhere, like university students, and that hard work can create something big, with limited funding.
VLC has more than 500 millions users, but a core team smaller than 12 people. dav1d is a decoder with around 240,000 lines of handwritten assembly, done by 10 people, but it runs on 2billions+ machines. x264 and FFmpeg encodes almost all the videos that you see online or offline.
SFSCON and Thanks
The SFSCON conference in Bolzano was amazing, with the same vibe and energy around developers, researchers, and open source advocates that I used to find in the conferences of old. This conference is quite remote, and yet, the attendance was impressive, and this is probably because of the dynamism of the organizers. Those events strengthen the Free Software ecosystem.
I’m deeply grateful to FSFE, LUGBZ, and the organizers in Bolzano for creating such an inspiring space for community and reflection.
Here’s to the next chapters of VLC and VideoLAN: “plays everything, runs everywhere, free the media”. Opens beats closed, always.
Thanks again for all your support.