You can hear a more detailed explanation on VLC’s stance from the man himself (JB Kempf) in the FOSS pod S1E11 episode around 22:10.
Basically:
- Not that many threats become lawsuits
- Patent trolling is countered with publicly accessible prior art
- Having no money is also a good deterrent
A few too many superlatives in their pitches for my taste. Not a bad idea overall, though the bias in favor of Rust is strong. Did it really become the go-to (heh) memory safe programming language for performance ?