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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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I'm curious to know why you think/feel that way.
I found/started using personal streaming solutions around 8 years ago; so post-Emby/MediaBrowser split into Jellyfin.
While I started with Plex, I very quickly came to despise their always online/centralized authentication system and moved to Emby as the only alternative I'd seen/heard of at the time. From there I learned of Jellyfin and (at least some of) it's origins; though I've had 0 reason/need/desire to actually install Jellyfin as Emby works fantastically.
I've been really quite happy with Emby; particularly with their stance of not tracking/collecting userdata and maintaining Emby as a private company focused on their customers instead of investors/partners. I understand some people don't like the Premiere licensing model they use; but I think it's a good way for the developers to ensure stable income for their work; and TBH, especially with the lifetime purchase option, I think it's undervalued. Unfortunately that model is not compatible with opensource (as users just fork it to remove the paywall), which is why Jellyfin exists from what I understand.
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don't know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that's why I'm generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn't even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don't have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it...yea. fuck em
That's kind of the root of the issue imo; having a subscription based model doesn't really work with open source as the project just gets forked every release to remove the subscription.
This leaves Emby with little option but to go closed source if they want income through subscriptions.
So, I'm not sure I understand what you mean with 'the way they went about it'. Is it the subscription you had an issue with, or the fact that they were no longer open source? What would you have done differently?
And, if you don't mind me asking: Had you supported (paid) Embys developers prior to them shifting to closed source + 'Emby Premiere'?
To be clear, I'm not trying to be argumentative or divisive; I'm just trying to understand the animosity towards Emby and why it's so often left out of the conversation, so to speak. It's something I've never been able to wrap my head around. Thanks for taking the time to chat about this.
It certainly can work, typically, not a whole lot of users would be capable of "just forking it and bypass the paywall". And of them, most (including myself) would rather just pay up (especially for quality software). Most of those remaining might just not be able to afford it, and probably wouldn't pay anyways (Your statement is, essentially, the same that giant corporations use against piracy). The actual rude/asshole users would be what's left, a small minority of a minority.
The fact of going closed source, especially after making statements saying they would pretty much keep it open source (Note: this part of my memory is iffy on this, this could have been just a forum/reddit post/reply from a core dev or something (I would still be pissed about it going closed regardless, because it's actually written in one of my preferred languages, C# :/))
There are definitely a few different monetization options, they could
have just done a subscription and kindly asked those with the means financially and technically to refrain from bypassing it (gamevau.lt does this I know for sure, how well it works out for them is...TBD, kinda young project but really cool to checkout if you're a gamer)
Write a closed source plugin that would house their closed source premium options, or write each premium feature as a plugin, so intro skipping could be a plugin you just buy on their web store for example
Do subscriptions for support packages or maybe even hosting
Have a community, open source branch and a premium closed source branch like pfSense does
Problem is, they sought little input if any from the community, just announced it as a "we're doing this and that's it". No trial runs of alternative plans, surveys or anything. Which they have that right as project owners, but it doesn't make it any less a rude thing to do
I'm fairly certain I didn't, pretty sure they announced it and going closed source and then I began bailing to Plex once I saw their response.
Having been off the scene for a while, I didn't know Jellyfin actually came from XBMC, that's interesting... So with Kodi and Jellyfin on my TV, I have two descendants of the same code, cool.
I loved my original Xbox with a 400gb HDD and movies and games backed up to the disk! My friends did too.