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.

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I love the Jellyfin team so much

[–] [email protected] 108 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wow. It's not often one reads a message like this. Keep up the great work, folks. ♥️

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

I only knew of debian. In case you can remember other occurrences, feel free to namedrop !!

[–] [email protected] 87 points 5 months ago

Wow. This is actually really touching. Shout-out to them. I'm so glad I installed this.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 5 months ago (1 children)

From their Open Collective page:

[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The first and easiest thing I'm seeing is to up that meager developer hardware budget.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] bitfucker 8 points 5 months ago

I can imagine it being used to test various older cards or other esoteric hardware

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Who are these people who think it's unethical to get paid for your work? It blows my mind that that could even be an accusation.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

It's their philosophy, not mine. I think the Lemmy devs get a meager salary, and I'm perfectly okay with that.

But if you're gonna stick to no pay, it makes sense to go all the way with it.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

When something becomes economic, non-profit or not, expectations from the userbase change.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Hard to believe, but there is still people out there doing thongs for fun or to make the world a better place.

Its very sad to think that all efforts shall be rewarded by money alone.

All the open source contributions I do, I do for free, just because I feel obliged to give back to the community, and I think its the right thing to do.

I don't condemn devs who want to make money out of open source, but I applause those who truly understand what is at the base of the concept of open source and are able to contribute for the fun or for the good of it.

Including Jellyfin people.

Thanks guys!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I fully agree with everything you said. I too have contributed countless hours to open source for personal enjoyment or for the good of the community and never been paid a cent.

The thing I lament is this sense I've seen in some circles that accepting donations or getting paid is somehow shameful. That the mere act of being compensated somehow diminishes the contribution. You can be paid and do it for the love of coding and do it for the benefit of everyone.

Everyone has the right to refuse payment, and people who do's wishes need to be respected. And I don't know the beliefs of the Jellyfin devs. But to me, a post like this feeds into that vague feeling that being paid somehow makes your contributions less "pure" or "desirable", than if you're solely doing it for fun or selfless reasons.

It's my strong belief that for open source alternatives to truly take off and go toe to toe with big tech, there needs to be a robust funding model underpinning it. If we as a community even see accepting donations as somehow "lesser than", what chance do we have of ever getting there?

[–] [email protected] 59 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 months ago

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.

@[email protected]

https://github.com/nielsvanvelzen

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

So heartwarming to see some of the key open-source projects having more than enough for development! Yay for the devs!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

This post might just push me to get infuse lifetime! Thanks for a great server app :)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

Never used Jellyfin, but I think this is dope!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Does anyone know of an all-in-one Helm chart or Kustomize manifest that has jellyfin bundled with all the -arr applications?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wouldn't that be a pain to maintain?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure, probably? I gave up on trying to setup the -arr suite in my cluster because I was having issues with sharing PVCs.

But I'd like to get everything playing nicely soonish. I was hoping for something all-in-one because each of the -arr apps has so much to configure, and there's a ton of interchangeable parts in the space, and I'd rather not have the cognitive overload of all the decisions and have a config that just works™

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Sharing PVC's seems like an anti pattern. My suggestion would be to share storage by having network storage instead like a NAS and share that with the same user in all Deployments. Generally for each *arr you need a /data and a /config so the data should be same location in the shared network solution. Check out https://hotio.dev/ for ready solutions which you only need to supply with the storage basically. Default settings works for me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

it's worth thinking if they put that money in a basic account with 5% interest (I get 4.5% in one of my accounts and 5.2% in another, so I'll simplify), with $24k in there, that would be $100 per month, or 20% of their monthly budget. 7% is quite common with basic etfs, but it's more annoying to move money back to pay bills then. My point is: this could/should last even longer. Money which doesn't increase in value, loses value (inflation).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Guess I won't donate to them now?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

but maybe later.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Why don't they donate to related projects

[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Maybe start a new fund then. They could get people to redirect there funds to projects in need of help. Think CoreJS and such.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

True, maybe create a list of projects that need funding.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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.