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.

all 50 comments

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[–] LazerDickMcCheese@sh.itjust.works 125 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I love the Jellyfin team so much

[–] cybervseas@lemmy.world 108 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 5 months ago

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

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 85 points 5 months ago

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

[–] ahal@lemmy.ca 78 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.

[–] atmur@lemmy.world 63 points 5 months ago (1 children)

From their Open Collective page:

[–] kakes@sh.itjust.works 41 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 14 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@programming.dev 7 points 5 months ago

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

[–] ahal@lemmy.ca 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.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 4 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.

[–] efstajas@lemmy.world 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.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 15 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.

[–] ahal@lemmy.ca 2 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.

[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 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.

[–] Ptsf@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago

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

[–] Shimitar@feddit.it 3 points 5 months ago

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!

[–] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 57 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!

[–] barkingspiders@infosec.pub 51 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.

@hetisniels@mastodon.social

https://github.com/nielsvanvelzen

[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 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?

[–] Kushan@lemmy.world 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.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 18 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!

[–] exu@feditown.com 17 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.

[–] mmmmmsoup@lemmy.today 16 points 5 months ago

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

[–] thefrankring@lemmy.world 12 points 5 months ago

Never used Jellyfin, but I think this is dope!

[–] LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 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

[–] NuclearDolphin@lemmy.ml 6 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?

[–] Procedure8295@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wouldn't that be a pain to maintain?

[–] NuclearDolphin@lemmy.ml 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™

[–] Procedure8295@lemmy.sdf.org 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.

[–] ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 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).

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Why don't they donate to related projects

[–] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 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

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 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.

[–] voracitude@lemmy.world 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?

[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 10 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.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] CrazyLikeGollum@lemmy.world 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.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.

[–] leetnewb@beehaw.org 0 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.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Guess I won't donate to them now?

[–] ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

but maybe later.

[+] Pfeffy@lemmy.world -3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

We all get frustrated some days, I appreciate that you deleted your comment, no worries.

[–] Pfeffy@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

You are right, it was an ignorant comment, born out of frustration from my day. I've removed it.

[–] macaroni1556@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 months ago

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!

[–] JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Pfeffy@lemmy.world -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

I think I explained what I was talking about rather well. Trying to view a piece of media in its highest release format isn't something that's always feasible. Anything even a few years old can to difficult to source. Ask anyone rebuilding a library after a drive failure. It's even worse if what you're trying to get had low viewership - it means an even smaller pool of people bothering to host the data.

While I'm sure this is a niche situation within a niche situation, hosting your own media library locally allows offline playback. Quite nice in during a thunderstorm. Not an option with what you've described as your methods, but again, definitely an uncommon use case.