Yeah. “How are they supposed to make their money” is a question that I’m grappling with right now. OSS is hard enough with a straightforward MIT license but figuring out how to monetize in the OSS space (that doesn’t always reward nuance), adds a lot of complexity. I’m starting fresh, so I’m not changing anything on anyone… but getting a monetization strategy that is 100% perfect out of the gate is not likely so seeing this vs. a response like Pangolin’s is helpful.

Really glad you replied. Thank you. Your points are really good ones. I want to build something (software) for myself and the community but also struggle with where to draw the line when it comes to making my product generate revenue too. It’s a thing we don’t really talk about when it comes to OSS. Maybe we should create a new category called SOSS, (sustainable oss) lol.

You have this semi-backwards. The VC isn’t really a leech because Plex pitches the venture fund with a well developed enshittification plan already in place. Assuming everyone is acting in good faith (i.e. the VC doesn’t just want to just shut it down and sell Plex for parts), Plex’s (enshittification) plan is the reason it makes sense for the venture fund to invest in the first place. Plex promises their plan is why the VC will make an outsized return on their investment and it is what the VC validates as part of their pre-investment due diligence. But that plan is created (and sometimes even put into operation) before any VC investment occurs.

What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.

Such a good question. Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons: one cynical, one a little more practical.

Cynical first lol: Maxmize profits. Why charge once when you can charge monthly. I’ll move off this bc it’s a topic that’s been beaten to death, esp. here on Lemmy.

The more practical reason is probably because most software interacts pretty directly with the internet in some way. When we were just installing MSOffice98 with clippy, software didn’t need constant security updates, patches, etc. Remember when there was an update for MSOffice and you’d install Service Pack 1? That was one of the first patches I downloaded from the internet and it was a big deal back then. Now updates come out at least monthly, many times more often than that. I guess that means that you have multple product cycles occuring concurrently, which creates a financial model with a lot more unknowns… which in turn makes it harder to forecast what a product should cost, considering it would be the only revenue generated, per license for the life of the product.

I think selling a product is still a very viable business model, but you have to be a lot more accurate about revenue forcasting and product pricing. I guess it means you have a lot less room for error (from a business perspective).

I’ve never been a Plex user. Always been with Jellyfin. I’ve heard that plexamp is a killer app but finamp has always been sufficient for my pretty basic needs. But I have a question for you (meant in good faith). You say,

I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.

If Plex needs a sustainable business model, asking for donations isn’t enough. So what is the move for them? What do they do to both fulfill their need for a sustainable business and also not upset their userbase? (I’m not defending Plex or this move of taking your server hostage, in any way.)

I’m genuinely curious how, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, they should have played this or at a minimum, made better moves than they did.

Very glad you’re with jellyfin btw. You can check out some cool plugins at awesome-jellyfin.

https://allenai.org/

This is really neat!

I think they’re actually legumes, not nuts.

I wonder if SELinux is the culprit here. Bazzite is based on Fedora, right (like Nobara)?

I appreciate the response. I updated it and there was some success in that Jellyfin isn’t throwing errors anymore, which is a step in the right direction. So thank you for that. Unfortunately it still isn’t working. I did a little more log digging and found this:

[16:35:50] [INF] [1] Jellyfin.Plugin.Dlna.Main.DlnaHost: Registering publisher for urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:MediaServer:1 on 172.21.0.2 with uri http://172.21.0.2:8096/dlna/6a8078b6-cb55-4b46-acf0-64e99f2a7a79/description.xml

I think the issue might(?) be that DLNA is on a docker subnet and my home receiver is on a local 192.169.x.x subnet. I’m not sure though.

Edit: I also checked the Jellyfin docs and tried opening up ports 1900 and 7359 on the gluetun container. That didn’t do anything though.

How have they doubled their prices?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2642674/plexs-lifetime-subscription-plan-is-getting-a-massive-price-hike.html

HDD manufacturers have been increasing their prices as of late for the same products that were previously cheaper

Nope. Most recent delta is a decrease of $0.0000022 per MB. And the general trend has been decreasing for decades.

my users can watch on their mobile devices for free using a license I paid for once close to a decade ago.

You sound like a boomer talking about the house they bought decades ago for $75,000.

It’s not the same at all.

Plex practically doubled their prices to access features that users previously had for free.

Can’t remember the last time a HDD manufacturer put previously free features behind a paywall or when a Mullvad doubled its prices.

Not a dumb question at all. There isn’t any software associated with my DAS. It attaches via a USB and mounts like a regular drive. It does have its own power supply so it stays on even when the computer is shut down. Then when the computer restarts, the drive mounts again.

It’s basically a giant attached hard drive.

I have a qnap tr-004 das. Works great. Raid5 configuration. Attached to my server. AMA.

Outside on the BBQ lol

I’d start with proxmox.

Why even take the risk? Just talk about something else.

$80 for a lifetime subscription is reasonable for a well developed app without venture capital subsiding the cost.

Plexpass lifetime is $120.

Mentioning Five Filters because no one has mentioned it yet. It will pull the full text of the articles and present them to you in your RSS reader (or FreshRSS) so you don’t have to navigate to a browser to read the article. Everything takes place in your native RSS app. I use it as a docker container. Actually, I create a stack with FreshRSS and Five Filters in the stack.

Five Filters has a paid service, but they also have a free docker app for people who want to self-host. https://github.com/heussd/fivefilters-full-text-rss-docker

I’m still searching for a good iOS reader app for FreshRSS.

I appreciate your effort here & the screenshots. Unfortunately, this isn’t what I was looking for. This just imports a “dumb” feed and doesn’t actually integrate with the API. Integrating with FreshRSS’ API, (the app OP mentioned), allows the RSS reader to interoperate with the FreshRSS application. For example, if I read an article on my mobile device, it will be marked as read on FreshRSS. So if I later pull up my feed on Newsboat (on my linux machine) or Readrops (my android tablet), those same articles won’t be presented to me again. Also, if I’ve made any customizations regarding my home feed in FreshRSS those will also be reflected in these other RSS Readers. That’s why the API is the preferred way to connect to these other readers.

I just didn’t see a place for a user/API key input within feeeed.