Found this <https://www.protocol.com/vlc-history-open-source> linked from a report on the new version of VLC, describing the history of the project back to its beginnings. Once upon a time there was “VideoLAN Server” and “VideoLAN Client”, but today everything has been rolled into a single “VLC” program. Of course it’s been in the sights of Intellectual Property lawyers for a long time: VLC's success also put it on the radar of patent lawyers, who started to send the VideoLAN team a growing number of legal threats, looking to extract licensing fees. Over the years, the VLC team received hundreds such legal threats over alleged patent violations. Virtually all of them were without merit, according to Kempf. Many were based on U.S. software patents that weren't easily enforceable in Europe. Others were citing technology that VLC was using even before companies tried to patent it. "No one is checking whether these patents are valid," Kempf said. "It's a complete mafia; it's protection money." The open-source x264 codec implementation was also an offshoot of VLC. And Jean-Baptiste Kempf says he could have done those software-bundling deals where unwary users get all kinds of things installed on their PCs in addition to the package they thought they were installing, and thereby earned tens of millions of dollars, but he didn’t want to. The project gets money from donations, but also from companies employing developers to build custom implementations for their set-top boxes.