There are definitely a few OSS that don't get anymore as much love as they deserve. VLC and OBS are two example of programs that are so damn good, even paid alternatives hardly can compete.
OBS is interesting because not only is it one of the best programs available for what it does (and cross platform to boot, which is huge), but it's also a catalyst for making people an absurd amount of money.
Pretty much every top streamer uses it. I wouldn't be surprised if OBS was responsible for generating over $75 million worth of earnings for just the top streamers on Twitch in the last few years, then there's Twitch's cut on top of it. That's going by 1 article saying just the top 10 streamers alone earned $20 million last year alone.
OBS is one of those products where I bet if they put up a Kickstarter asking for support they would end up raising a few million. Come to think of it now, I wonder if Twitch has tried to buy / fund OBS in the past.
OBS could make a lot of money by offering a few premium features for an annual donation. Something like a more advanced banner editor, or an animation engine.
It’s amazing software and I would like to see the developers and the organization thrive and be sustainable for the long term.
Honestly, streaming aside, before OBS there really wasn't any way to record your webcam except the shitty proprietary webcam application. Similarly, for screen recording, most people used Fraps or Taxi, both of which were very limited.
Maybe the lack of human resources is offset by the lack of managerial bottleneck (you can just get stuff done and solve problems immediately with your keyboard without the need for weekly meetings or approval from some non-caring boss)? I've always been astounded too.
The end of the book 'The PayPal Wars' gives fascinating context on how development just completely dies in a corporate environment. They went from being able to roll major new features in a weekend to requiring months just to schedule a meeting to discuss a font change. It's a fascinating read when we now look back at how PayPal just stagnated under Ebay's ownership.
I think twitter is a few thousand total employees, a fraction of that is engineers.
And a good chunk of it is maintaining & improving a large throughput backend system that is one of the top 10 in the world in terms of size and data volume.
And on top of that, an even smaller fraction is the people who think of and implement new front end things that you would interact with and think of the app changing. Like a lot of companies, it's probably a 10:1 ratio as far as backend:frontend people there are at the company.
As to why twitter changes so little, the company itself doesn't really understand why it's successful, so there is a lot of conservatism inside of it to not screw with the golden goose.
I'm not sure they are comparable.
One force of VLC is that it litteraly runs everywhere.
MPC-HC only works on windows, so it's not comparable. mpv has also a lot of target platforms, but not as much as VLC. It's really nice though, and I think a bit of competition is good.
VLC runs everywhere, but do you really need something that runs everywhere literally? Is this like the old hat trick of running Doom on your fridge? I'm content using mpc-hc on Windows and mpv on Linux/Mac. What else is there?
I was pretty die hard against VLC (i've moved everything I do to mpv wrappers once MPC-HC became abandonware) but I'd give vlc another chance if you haven't looked at it in a while. It's come a long way if your opinions were founded nearly a decade ago like mine were.
