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

oook, but why?

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

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.

He is French. Cut him some slack ;-)

/s obviously

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.