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.
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
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.
From their Open Collective page:
The first and easiest thing I’m seeing is to up that meager developer hardware budget.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
Wow. It’s not often one reads a message like this. Keep up the great work, folks. ♥️
Why don’t they donate to related projects
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?
I love the Jellyfin team so much
Guess I won’t donate to them now?
This post might just push me to get infuse lifetime! Thanks for a great server app :)
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).
Wow. This is actually really touching. Shout-out to them. I’m so glad I installed this.
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.
