tkw8

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.

This feels like a paid advertisement ”review” to me. There is basically nothing negative or critical at all. No places to improve? Here is the most critical bit in the entire post:

If you use GNOME, you should definitely be giving Ghostty a try. To be completely fair, I did not dislike using it on my other KDE Plasma — based machine either, but it does not feel as “native” yet. One day it will, though…

Mmmmm 😕

That is something that a pihole can sort completely, no?

I took a quick look at your website. The projects look really interesting. But just fyi, you might consider putting the website description text through an English grammar checker.

Both devices made ping attempts. Not hard to confirm with firewall logs bc of timestamps and internal IP addresses.

Physical disc in a cd/dvd/bluray drive

A 1080p player does not require internet connectivity but 4K/UHD discs need to phone home in order to get decryption keys on a per disc basis. There is a lot of discussion about this in the MakeMKV forums if you want to do a deeper dive.

It does but I use makemkv for the Blu-ray decryption