cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639

I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That’s it folks. I’ve been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.

They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.

I’ll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I’ve been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it’s time to make it production ready.

Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.

And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:

  • YES I know I’m unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
  • My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don’t understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn’t have to, that’s why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
  • Plex is still removing functionality. I don’t care that “People should pay their fair share”. If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that’s completely okay. They are removing functionality.
    • “But they have cloud costs”. Remote streaming is negligible to them. It’s a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That’s it.
    • “Good luck finding another remote streaming” - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that’s a separate conversation). All “remote streaming” is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported “free” content that they’re probably losing money on.

In short, I don’t care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They’re removing functionality that has been free for years. I’m not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of “openness”. it’s stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it’s happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.

    “you could technically argue”??? That’s literally, unambiguously the law. That’s how the licensing works. This isn’t a technicality; it’s a fundamental, widely understood feature of the license. That’s how the license was designed to work. On top of that, licenses like the GPL have extremely stringent requirements for changing the license. (Here, Jellyfin uses GPLv2, so we’ll go with that.)

    Everyone with work in the current codebase has copyright over that work under the GPLv2. Nobody relinquishes that to some centralized entity. Thus, you have two options for every single individual person whose contributions are still extant in your project (no matter how large): 1) get their consent not just to relicense but to the specific license you want, or 2) remove their work from the project either because you can no longer contact them or because they’ve said no.

    The fact that you called this process “stupid easy” for anything but the smallest, most insular project is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard today, and I’m not even wasting my time reading the rest of your comment given how shockingly willing you are to not just speak about things you have zero understanding of but to somehow arrive at the most false statement possible about them.