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.
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this.
Greed… do you really need 3 more?
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 <checks notes> 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.
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.
Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?
Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)
the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)
streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that
Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams
Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow
See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?
Nobody outside Plex’s finance department is going to have what you’re looking for if those examples are anything to go by.
What it comes down to is they have $130M that investors are going to want back and all the decisions they’re making now are aimed at doing so. That doesn’t mean any of those decisions are good or are going to work. It didn’t even mean they won’t backfire and have the opposite effect.
Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.
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.
Plex is a private company…
Plex is a private company wanting money… Jellyfin is a voluteer-drive effort
Enshitification happens to privately develop products due to <checks notes> greed… Jellyfin is not a private company pushing a product for profit
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.
As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.
Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?
Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)
the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)
streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that
Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams
Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow
See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?
Nobody outside Plex’s finance department is going to have what you’re looking for if those examples are anything to go by.
What it comes down to is they have $130M that investors are going to want back and all the decisions they’re making now are aimed at doing so. That doesn’t mean any of those decisions are good or are going to work. It didn’t even mean they won’t backfire and have the opposite effect.
Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.
Here you can see, what they do with the money:
https://opencollective.com/jellyfin