A big part of the appeal with Plex is that you can run a server and friends can sign up for a FREE account and stream remotely. When you take this away, you’re going to just kneecap the whole offering. This is such an arrogant move from Plex: they are thinking that when this change goes live they will get a flood of subscriptions. The more likely outcome is they will get a few subscriptions and a lot more angry and frustrated people that walk away.
I don’t think they necessarily have to get rid of it, it’s just that you can’t support a company ALONE from a one time infusion.
It’s a scary amount of projects these days managed by a bunch of ZIP files:
I keep a Jellyfin instance running as a hedge. Here’s the thing with Plex (and actually a lot of companies set up similarly): those “lifetime” memberships are a trap. Think about it: Plex gets your money ONCE but they have ongoing expenses. Sooner or later, they’ll have spent every single cent made by a lifetime membership unless they either get more folks OR squeeze everyone a bit more.
Once they started adding their own shows and making strange UI decisions, I could sense the end was coming. A move like this brings it up fast. Jellyfin is not nearly as good as Plex in a lot of ways, but it’s really Open Source.
Anyway, a lot of rambling, but in short: when there is a “lifetime” subscription, watch out!
Even better, maybe it will support Docker.
Well, if they manage to get it working on Android I’ll be really impressed.
I have had a plex instance but when they started adding their own movies and crapola into it, and requiring logins and etc etc etc I started keeping a Jellyfin instance live as a hedge. I still use Plex primarily, but use Jellyfin and keep it patched just in case. If there’s any kind of ugly action with Plex, I feel like my bets are pretty well hedged. Plex definitely has a lot more polish than Jellyfin, but I wouldn’t doubt if there is a rug-pull in some way or another. After all, Plex sold a bunch of lifetime subscriptions ONCE but they still end up paying to support those. Sooner or later they are going to want more money again.
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Plans like this work great for the first couple of weeks. Turns out software engineering isn’t this simple fucking thing. Making anything beyond a toy takes actual work. There are lots of people learning this first hand right now. There is some kind of belief that ChatGPT version 0.1+ (whatever ships in 2 weeks) will be able to take over the job of software development entirely. Well, guess what? Doing anything relatively complex in software takes actual intelligence. Once there is an AI that can just code by itself, it will also be smart enough to be a doctor, civil engineer, consultant, etc.
A lot of fucking companies are going to learn this first hand. They are either firing their staff thinking the AI wave is already here, and in reality, it may never come.
The near future of AI is skilled software engineers using AI to augment their productivity. By the time you can take the human out of the loop, AI will be so powerful it will slay any white collar job, but this won’t be for years and years and years and by then it won’t just be software that is in trouble as a career; it will be many, many industries.
Sweet, I can’t wait to see ModAI implementing moderation to further Reddit’s boring echo chamber.
If the developers’ wants and needs don’t intersect with a given user, there is no way forward for that user, community manager or not.
I suspect the small size of the dev team and the general nature of an OSS project means there aren’t swarms of people around volunteering to be community managers.
Small projects your sway with the project is directly proportional to your ability to submit pull requests. It’s just a sad fact that it’s easier to say “I wish we had feature X” vs. “Here is a pull request that implements feature X”.
At least with OSS you are getting what you paid for (nothing!), vs commercial companies where you pay for the software and they STILL ignore you.
Even “Why don’t you open an issue on our source tracker” will often effectively shut down suggestions from less tech savvy newcomers.
How should developers handle feature requests? Keep in mind there is a need for the whole team to see the suggestion and it’s also good to have a place to gather feedback and further discuss.
I’m not. I’m talking about in companies where dev A wants dev B to do some work, but they don’t use git or any kind of source control, so you email over a cursed ZIP file, then dev B does the work and sends it back with a different name. It’s a highly cursed situation.