We have quite a budget collected over the last 5 years, and while we’re really happy to see so many in the Jellyfin community contribute to us, we want to ask you to stop!
No, really. We don’t actually need your money. At least, not here and now.
We have over $24,000 in the bank, and with average monthly expenses of only ~$600, that’s over 40 months (3.3 years) of runway! So, we have plenty of money for the near future.
Thus, at this time, we want you to seriously consider donating to the authors of Clients you use, instead of (or in addition to) the main project. Client support is the hardest part of the Jellyfin ecosystem to keep going, and most of them are maintained by only a single person or very small team. With the API changes in 10.9.0 and the upcoming 10.10.0 releases, they’re going to be very busy trying to keep up, and thus could really use your support in a way that the core project here doesn’t right now.
So, if there’s a client you use every day and that you love, consider finding it’s author in our list of official clients, and sending them a little something instead (or too).
No, this doesn’t violate our policy of “no paid development”, because donations are just that - donations. We will still not honour bug bounties or similar, and still not use our collective finance here for paid development. So don’t feel like you’re doing something wrong, you’re not!
I’ll leave this notice up until we drop to ~1 year (12 months) of remaining runway, at which time we can re-evaluate where we’re at.
Happy watching!
I personally would rather see then take some of the “extra” money and apportion it to suitable client projects themselves, but I can understand them not wanting to become financial administrators in that way.
I love the Jellyfin team so much
Wow. It’s not often one reads a message like this. Keep up the great work, folks. ♥️
I only knew of debian. In case you can remember other occurrences, feel free to namedrop !!
Wow. This is actually really touching. Shout-out to them. I’m so glad I installed this.
How can costs only be $600 / month. Do they not pay themselves? I guess that’s admirable, but it doesn’t set a good precedent. Will any young developers read this and internalize that they shouldn’t ask for money? OSS maintainers deserve to get paid for their efforts.
From their Open Collective page:
The first and easiest thing I’m seeing is to up that meager developer hardware budget.
Probably not worth the PR hit. There’s at least tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars of development work in Jellyfin. (Sorry my order of magnitude isn’t more precise.) Getting $2500 out of a developer budget may not be worth the accusations of being paid in hardware.
Not that I would complain, but I can see the logic. Imagine donating $200,000 worth of developer time and then being accused of doing it for the money because you got a $2100 laptop out of it.
I do wonder what the $300 was for. It’s gotta be some kind of specific hardware component testing.
I can imagine it being used to test various older cards or other esoteric hardware
Totally agree, this honestly sounds a bit like putting principles before reason. Personally, I don’t at all see why paying people for their work would make projects adhere any less to the “open source ethos”, even though I hear this idea a lot. I think that in an ideal world, it should be possible to contribute to OSS projects full-time and make a living, financed by donations from dependants (including corporations) that profit off of the free software and have a vested interest in continued and rapid development of the project.
If you really don’t want the money to reward contributors, why not pass it on to open-source dependencies of your project that are looking for funding? FOSS projects not scrambling for funding is pretty rare today unfortunately.
Yes completely agree. The cool thing about opencollective is the transparency - that should mean the core devs should be happy to pay themselves some money for their time. This is how projects sustain themselves IMHO.
It’s their choice and we should respect that. If you want to donate, there are plenty of worthy recipients who will be happy about your contribution.
Oh for sure. I don’t think anyone is arguing that they don’t have the right to ask people to stop sending them money. But we can still criticize that position. I’m not sure they’ve thought through the message they are sending.
When something becomes economic, non-profit or not, expectations from the userbase change.
Jellyfin is such a great piece of software and I’m so glad the main project has the funds they need. I follow one of the lead android tv app developers and I’ll absolutely plug him as a great place to send some donations. These people do enterprise grade work as a hobby and absolutely deserve a few of our dollars.
@hetisniels@mastodon.social
Companies: Will slurp up and sell every last bit of your user data to the highest bidder just to make one fraction of a cent extra profit
Open Source Projects: Stop giving us money!
deleted by creator
Consider the impact of donating to one or more clients as the main project.
- People donating did so to the main project, not a client.
- What happens if the donation goes to a client that you feel is unworthy for whatever reason.
- What happens if your preferred client doesn’t get a donation?
Open collective can let you specify where you want that donated money to go, so if the jellyfin admins wanted to they could have set OC up in such a way that donations could go to specific areas - not just clients, but specific feature development even.
If you’re concerned that your donation to the project wouldn’t go to something you value or your wanted to ensure a client you cared about had support, that would have been a better way to manage it.
I really think jellyfin is making a mistake by not centralising development costs for all the various clients and such out there, especially for those that require some developer account or certification to get on a storefront.
It feels like I heard that somewhere before and looking at my profile, I did cancel Jellyfin at some point.
I supported Finamp for a while until they removed sponsoring, guess I’ll do Findroid now.
This post might just push me to get infuse lifetime! Thanks for a great server app :)
So heartwarming to see some of the key open-source projects having more than enough for development! Yay for the devs!
Never used Jellyfin, but I think this is dope!
This is great to hear, now maybe hire some more developers to make it work so i can switch. I desperately want to ditch plex, and i have jellyfin installed along side it for testing. It still regularly fails at basic content matching, playback of various files, and has significantly worse transcoding performance than plex.
So while I’m desperate to escape them as they charge for basic features like tone mapping I’m also stuck until an alternative is at least as usable as plex. It’s the one thing i don’t have an open source self host for at this point.
I’ve got immich for photos, Seafile for storage, my own pastebin, a piped instance (YouTube front end), a whoogle instance and several other self host alternatives. Really hoping jellyfin can take over for plex
Guess I won’t donate to them now?
Why don’t they donate to related projects
Taking donations for a specific purpose (developing jellyfin core) then spending it on something else (donations to other related projects) is something donors and tax authorities generally frown on
Maybe start a new fund then. They could get people to redirect there funds to projects in need of help. Think CoreJS and such.
And take time away from jellyfin to administer it? Nah, let people donate to the client they use makes the most sense. They have a list of clients they like, why isn’t that enough?
If I donate to a project or charity, o would not be happy of my money went to another project I didn’t agree with. Especially when bad things could happen our of their control. It is all risk, no benefit. Advising donators to donate where its needed is better than using their donated funds.
If they donated to a client for a niche device and it turned out there was code in it that gobbled up peoples data without consent it would backfire horribly.
True, maybe create a list of projects that need funding.
They mention in the post that they have a list of official clients you can choose to donate to.
So, if there’s a client you use every day and that you love, consider finding it’s author in our list of official clients, and sending them a little something instead (or too).
It would probably be helpful if they included a link to that list in the post, though it is just one click from the projects homepage, and made it clearer that the list does include at least some subset of third-party clients. Though it would also be reasonable to infer that from the quote.
Or just let the users decide for themselve?
They are grown up enough to install a program. They are probably old enough to just take their money elsewhere and as the Jellyfin team asked to, donate to some other Jellyfin 3rd party dev.The average person isn’t going to delve into the nuance of open source project structure. If I wanted to support the jellyfin ecosystem, I would probably expect that donating to the jellyfin project is sufficient.
deleted by creator
Wow, you came to the Jellyfin community to write a long comment saying “I don’t know what this is and I don’t care”?
You don’t have to care!
We all get frustrated some days, I appreciate that you deleted your comment, no worries.
You are right, it was an ignorant comment, born out of frustration from my day. I’ve removed it.
Time and time again, media will be removed from public viewing for nearly any reason. Online streaming services have what you want to watch only so long as their license to it is valid. Once it expires, it’s gone off that platform - and not always to another one. Or the media gets edited to remove or alter something the owners don’t want to promote.
This is even true for the varying methods of sailing. Not everything will be available indefinitely. Certainly not at zero effort. While not being as simple as signing up for a service and watching a low bitrate copy of something within thirty seconds, it’s not rocket science. You can get Jellyfin running with a small library in half an hour.
Ultimately, do what suits you. A local media server works for some. Others will have everything in a single folder and view it through VLC. It’s pretty irrelevant though when the vast majority just pay a subscription to one or multiple of the streaming companies that continue to serve watered down libraries at ever increasing prices.
I don’t know what you are talking about. I have never been unable to access whatever media I wanted using nothing but a web browser for the last 20 years.
The last problem I can remember having is not being able to see season 2 of interview with a vampire on streamio because of some weird glitch. So I opened a browser and played it in like 15 seconds just by googling what I wanted to watch and Free TV.
