A few days ago, VLC – the popular video app for playing odd Codecs – made its appearance on Windows Phone for the public. At the time, it was not clear if this was the official release or the public beta of the app. As it turns out, it was the latter. As such, some negative user complaints came in, at times unfairly targeting the developer, Thomas Nigro. What followed next was an interesting – and disturbing – back and forth between VideoLAN (who own the VLC property) and the Windows Phone community. Although this incident is technically old news, the point illustrated is very relevant.

VideoLAN takes offense In a series of tersely worded tweets, VideoLAN took to Twitter to berate Windows Phone users over their behavior: "Dear WP community, If you want applications, maybe you should stop acting like this…This amount of lack of respect is unbelievable...Especially against a young open source developer, who owes you nothing." The "this" in the above exchange was referring to a negative review of the beta app that called out Nigro for being "very slow". Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more

Following that exchange, some users took VideoLAN to task for what they thought was an overreaction. Indeed, in one conversation (since deleted) VideoLAN even threatened to pull the app (and the project) all together, while saying some not so nice things about Windows Phone fans.