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.
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!
Why don’t they donate to related projects
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.
True, maybe create a list of projects that need funding.
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.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.
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.
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
Maybe start a new fund then. They could get people to redirect there funds to projects in need of help. Think CoreJS and such.
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?
This post might just push me to get infuse lifetime! Thanks for a great server app :)
Never used Jellyfin, but I think this is dope!
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
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
Wow. This is actually really touching. Shout-out to them. I’m so glad I installed this.
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).
Does anyone know of an all-in-one Helm chart or Kustomize manifest that has jellyfin bundled with all the -arr applications?
Wouldn’t that be a pain to maintain?
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™
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?
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.
Wow. It’s not often one reads a message like this. Keep up the great work, folks. ♥️
I only knew of debian. In case you can remember other occurrences, feel free to namedrop !!
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.
Guess I won’t donate to them now?
So heartwarming to see some of the key open-source projects having more than enough for development! Yay for the devs!
I love the Jellyfin team so much
