I vouched for this post because I have corresponded with him and he engaged in an in unnecessarily condescending way. What are you referring to by GSOC?

Same experience here and upvoted accordingly. I stopped using/recommending VLC all the way back in 2012 due to Mr. Kempf's appallingly dismissive/aggressive attitude to carefully-expressed constructive feedback from multiple users after a regressive UI change (my handle here was "sillyrat" and then "silly-rat"):

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=98182&p=3281...

TL;DR: they decided to force the playlist to stay open all the time, thus killing "mini-player" mode; reaction to this was, unsurprisingly, uniformly negative (but expressed politely); Mr. Kempf's response was to attack VLC users; I did an end-run around him by opening a bug ticket so other developers would be made aware of the problem, and Mr. Kempf banned me for doing so; my ticket was approved and addressed by other developers, fixing the issue; Mr. Kempf tried to back-pedal pitifully.

Same. Maybe it's the open source ecosystem that forced him to be overly self confident, to fly above the cognitive noise.

Thats funny, I met him during GSoC too over a decade ago, and he's been on top of the open source game.

I had a quick chat with him at a conference in Munich and I thought he was pretty chill, but I think it was 15y ago.

He is French. Cut him some slack ;-)

/s obviously

oook, but why?