It’s still hilarious to me that Plex, a project forked from the XBMC (now Kodi) free open-source app for organizing and playing one’s own entirely legally obtained video files, is a big streaming business thing that charges people money.
It’s like finding a tree in the forest that gives out infinite free apples, and then setting up an apple-selling table right next to it stocked with apples you obviously got from that tree.
Someone comes in, contributes a bit, then forks, then closes it off once they realize there’s a path to monetization.
Plex is a particularly egregious example: the initial author forked xbmc to make a mac port. This led to a crazy amount of popularity very fast and they saw the path to monetization. They soon after created plex server separate from the client and went to the crazy step of rewriting everything GPL so they could fully close source.
This is legally fine but ethically fucked; they had a derivative app that technically no longer shared code with kodi but there was the fact that design cues, data structures, etc were mostly inherited. Plex wouldn’t exist without kodi. And that’s totally fine, derivative works should be allowed and encouraged. But what’s fucked is that they made serious efforts to close source and give nothing back to the community that they were built from. Code? Nothing. When they got 40 million in VC? nothing.
See also a bunch of players in 3d printing, notably Bambu at the moment. But they’ll keep getting away with it thanks to a combination of governments that are like “money is more important than fairness or progress” and idiotic consumers that are like “oh I have to spend 30 seconds longer figuring something out? Ugh fuck you im gonna buy what some YouTuber was paid $400 to recommend”
No… it’s like picking up those apples, shipping them across the country, and then charging customers a delivery fee. Which is perfectly reasonable because time and fuel cost money.
Plex helps you (and others) stream from your library pretty brainlessly. Sure there are other options, but all of them are more complicated.
This is it. People have always paid for convenience.
Just look at console vs PC gaming.
Steamdeck made Linux gaming mainstream because it’s brainless. Backed by proton.
But console has a vice grip on some communities / groups due to a long standing “plug and play” sales pitch. Now they’re stuck because “my friends are there.”
My brother-in-law is a sysadmin and stuck on Playstation due to his friends. Doesn’t even own a gaming PC because “he doesn’t have the time to tinker.”
Technically, it’s like facilitating the shipping of those apples, but leaving the customer to ship.
Plex server->client streams don’t go through Plex’s servers themselves, but directly from server to clients. P2P. AFAIK the only exception is when something goes wrong and it falls back to a Plex-hosted server as an intermediary, which should be rare.
That’s still a pretty useful service though. Getting P2P reliable and easy isn’t trivial, and is one reason why open source projects haven’t really supplanted it yet.
It’s still hilarious to me that Plex, a project forked from the XBMC (now Kodi) free open-source app for organizing and playing one’s own entirely legally obtained video files, is a big streaming business thing that charges people money.
It’s like finding a tree in the forest that gives out infinite free apples, and then setting up an apple-selling table right next to it stocked with apples you obviously got from that tree.
This happens all the time in FOSS
Someone comes in, contributes a bit, then forks, then closes it off once they realize there’s a path to monetization.
Plex is a particularly egregious example: the initial author forked xbmc to make a mac port. This led to a crazy amount of popularity very fast and they saw the path to monetization. They soon after created plex server separate from the client and went to the crazy step of rewriting everything GPL so they could fully close source.
This is legally fine but ethically fucked; they had a derivative app that technically no longer shared code with kodi but there was the fact that design cues, data structures, etc were mostly inherited. Plex wouldn’t exist without kodi. And that’s totally fine, derivative works should be allowed and encouraged. But what’s fucked is that they made serious efforts to close source and give nothing back to the community that they were built from. Code? Nothing. When they got 40 million in VC? nothing.
See also a bunch of players in 3d printing, notably Bambu at the moment. But they’ll keep getting away with it thanks to a combination of governments that are like “money is more important than fairness or progress” and idiotic consumers that are like “oh I have to spend 30 seconds longer figuring something out? Ugh fuck you im gonna buy what some YouTuber was paid $400 to recommend”
No… it’s like picking up those apples, shipping them across the country, and then charging customers a delivery fee. Which is perfectly reasonable because time and fuel cost money.
Plex helps you (and others) stream from your library pretty brainlessly. Sure there are other options, but all of them are more complicated.
This is it. People have always paid for convenience.
Just look at console vs PC gaming.
Steamdeck made Linux gaming mainstream because it’s brainless. Backed by proton.
But console has a vice grip on some communities / groups due to a long standing “plug and play” sales pitch. Now they’re stuck because “my friends are there.”
My brother-in-law is a sysadmin and stuck on Playstation due to his friends. Doesn’t even own a gaming PC because “he doesn’t have the time to tinker.”
Technically, it’s like facilitating the shipping of those apples, but leaving the customer to ship.
Plex server->client streams don’t go through Plex’s servers themselves, but directly from server to clients. P2P. AFAIK the only exception is when something goes wrong and it falls back to a Plex-hosted server as an intermediary, which should be rare.
That’s still a pretty useful service though. Getting P2P reliable and easy isn’t trivial, and is one reason why open source projects haven’t really supplanted it yet.
I’ve never used any of the features they’ve added after they allowed me to host my library of ripped optical media ~2013-2014.