Should be a full stop with "profit". All the shitty things that go with companies chasing it.
It’s going to be super funny when plex gets sued for directly profiting from piracy.
One reason: It's not FOSS, and because of that, it's not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that's always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.
The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.
We've seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.
With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.
Don't trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.
PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️
If they were going to get enshittified, they should've been smarter about it to gradually introduce lock-in. The switching cost of going to Jellyfin is almost zero. Did it in an afternoon about a year ago. Ya done goofed, Plex
I'm going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.
You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don't care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you're in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn't even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else's data.
If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I'd like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn't used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.
I prefer open source, but if I’m buying proprietary software, let’s do it fairly and sustainably. Don’t charge me a 1-time fee and then enshittify what I bought because your business model isn’t working. On the other hand, don’t charge me multiple times for the same software with a subscription. The most fair arrangement to both of us is to sell perpetual licenses for a specific version and then charge me for major updates. If your newer versions introduce massive improvements, then I might give you more money. It’s also fair to do free upgrades for a period of time and then charge for major upgrades. Finally, don’t force me to use your software always online and if you must have an activation process, provide a way to activate from a different machine by uploading an activation file or whatever.
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Plex took a significant degree of other people’s money, to the tune of over 40 million dollars. The people who gave said money were not kickstarter funders, donators, subscribers, etc but investors, who have an expectation that plex will move the company in a direction that makes them profitable enough to not only repay the 40+ million investment, but to then earn profits for a lengthy period (possibly in perpetuity) as they are stakeholders. This is the same thing that happened to Reddit (though Reddits scale and timeline was FAR more vast), openai, Google, literally every company ever basically. Plex now has an obligation to not just continue development but to continue it in a way that maximizes growth and revenue, even if that is anti consumer.
Jellyfin on the other hand has language on their contributions page that almost discourages financial support. This is because the only financial support they accept is donations, which are clearly explained are to support the free software and give no ownership stake. The software does not generate profit and donation does not equate to any kind of investment, other than supporting continued development. Expecting any kind of return on your part (again, other than the project continuing to move forward) is foolish. Lemmy is similar, as are many other FOSS projects. Jellyfin can remain ideologically stable to its goals, and because it is free if its users feel the lead developers are straying from this they can fork it and make “new ideologically pure jellyfin” (see xmbc to plex to emby to jellyfin, or lemmys 938 forks, many of which are tweaks and some of which are because people got beef with the main devs)
Further to this, I heard Cory Doctorow talk about open source licensing being a Ulysses Pact. Basically Ulysses wanted to hear the sirens song. Normally, hearing it would drive you mad and you would wreck upon the rocks. Ulysses ordered his men to bind their ears with wax so they would not be affected by the sirens song. He also ordered them to tie him to the mast.
In the moment, he knew he would not be strong enough to resist the sirens song and because he was bound to the mast, he could not jump overboard. In the same way, people that use open source licenses on their projects are binding themselves to the open source license so that if a large temptation was to present itself (such as investors wanting to give them life changing money in exchange for mistreating their customers) they are already bound by that license and cannot break that bond.
Or they’ll do what plex did. Reminder that plex started life as a fork of xbmc/kodi for macos. When their fork showed some popularity they shifted development to various names (plex home theater). While this still contained a lot of GPL code they then spent a good deal of dev time rewriting said code to be fully closed source.
This is less discussed but also why plex is one of the most insidious and disgusting pieces of unethical software one can use. The writing is on the wall and the company is led by scumbags, sure, but people don’t talk as much about how they forked xbmc, built a huge product based on everything learned from it, and then closed everything off once they did the minimum required cover your ass moves.
What they did is legal but is it ethical? If they did it to a company like apple or Microsoft they’d get sued, that’s for damn sure. And ethically speaking I would say it’s really fucked to take all this stuff from the community: architecture, ideas, ui/ux, approaches to plugin design, data modeling, etc and build a whole company off of it, then basically give nothing back. They closed it off so they could get their bag, fuck the community that taught them so much and helped build their MVP.
What you describe is similar to the creation of jellyfin from emby though; where embys dev team suddenly decided to close source the GPL server code (a violation) and add monetization. the community rejected this, and forked the last version prior to the nonsense into what is now jellyfin.
Yeah, Jellyfin could go closed source and enshitify but up until that point, the source would be available to fork. I hope that Jellyfin doesn't go that way but if it does, I think someone would fork the project and continue developing and supporting the software.
Clearly, given Plex and Emby's history, it is a threat to Jellyfin as well.
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this.
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Plex is a private company wanting money... Jellyfin is a voluteer-drive effort
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
Enshitification happens to privately develop products due to greed... Jellyfin is not a private company pushing a product for profit
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Back to "greed"
plus jellyfin is open source. if they start enshittifying, people can just fork it. That will keep them in line. Look what happened with emby. They've been sent to oblivion and no one even talks about them anymore.
Plex is a private company..
Meh, I went into plex settings on the server and just turned off all the bloat. Its all on one page. Not a big deal.
I went into no settings on Jellyfin and everything stayed sane and the same.
Sure, but you also don't have the option to use those features because they don't exist in jellyfin.
In my plex instance, I have discover enabled, and enabled all the streaming services so that discover is populated with all the movies and shows available. Then I have an automation setup so I can search in discover for a movie, and add it to my watchlist, and my automation will automatically download that movie and add it to my library.
I can do it right from my couch, and its WAF approved. Using those bloat features against them, in a way.
But, its just as easy to turn those all off if one doesn't want to utilize them. I'd be annoyed if they forced them on permanently but that's not what plex does, but they sure get a lot of hate for just having those features.
That's a feature I wouldnt want in mine for example.
I just want my stuff and only mine.
But hey: Everyones gotta choose their own. And if youre happy, who am I to judge.
Sure, so you open settings and simply disable those extras. Then you have a nice clean ui with only your libraries. It even cleans up the app when disabled so there's only home and libraries tabs. Nothing more.
I think many people aren't aware all the extras have disable options in plex. Essentially turning it back into plex from years ago.
IMO: Not the point.
Essentially the same discussion here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/23054418
Sure, you could do it by turning 5 switches and 2 knobs but mine just does what I tell it to.
(And I don't have to pay for remote access or HWA)
Great, now how do you deal with 30 remote streamers when your IP changes? Do you have tobsetup extra knobs just to get remote streaming to work? Are your apps refined or still buggy?
I'd personally rather deal with 5 options to turn off in settings than deal with all those extra steps and drawbacks. You really seem to have a huge hate bone for plex, so enjoy your choice, and move on.
Since I have a domain, I use DynDNS.
I needed it anyway so why not use it also there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Goodness, how am I supposed to store and stream more entertainment than I could watch in a lifetime now?
The thing it replaced... XBMC? O_o
Xbmc was renamed Kodi and it's still revenant. It has a totally different use case than Plex or jellyfin and there's plugins for both.
Did you mean to type 'relevant' or are you suggesting it's a zombie project?
Playing devil's advocate, I understand one point of pressure: Plex doesn’t want to be perceived as a “piracy app.”
See: Kodi. https://kodi.expert/kodi-news/mpaa-warns-increasing-kodi-abuse-poses-greater-video-piracy-risk/
To be blunt, that’s a huge chunk of their userbase. And they run the risk of being legally pounded to dust once that image takes hold.
So how do they avoid that? Add a bunch of other stuff, for plausible deniability. And it seems to have worked, as the anti-piracy gods haven’t singled them out like they have past software projects.
To be clear, I'm not excusing Plex. But I can sympathize.
Stopped using Plex and moved to jellyfin around 12 months ago and have never looked back
Clients suck on non plex
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