Comment on That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing

• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Absolutely true for FOSS. For freeware? My opinion is that it’s money wasted because, unlike FOSS:

  • I have no way of auditing what I’m putting money toward.
  • There’s no way for the community to keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.
  • Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better spent to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about bettering the world.
  • Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I have no way of auditing what I’m putting money toward.

    same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of “openness”.

    There’s no way for the community to keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.

    previous point. it’s stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it’s happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.

    Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better donated to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about bettering the world.

    I’ve known plenty of FOSS founders that were huge pieces of shit. racist bigoted sexist shitheads. At least with proprietary vendors I can trust they will do anything to continue being fluid/viable.

    just want to add, not all FOSS founders are pieces of shit. same can be said for vendors as well.

    Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.o keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.

    why isn’t it? if it’s a generally better solution don’t you owe it to yourself and your “customers” to use the best solution? yes, use FOSS. yes, work with FOSS devs. What do you do when the project refuses to incorporate features you would like, even if you’re willing to pay for them? then there’s no difference between proprietary and FOSS, right?

    enshitification doesn’t just affect vendors, it happens to FOSS projects all-the-time. I’ve personally experienced it when a bookkeeping app removed support for USD. when asked the founder refused to address it and simply stated that they couldn’t continue supporting a currency that fuels so much corruption in the world. now tell me, how does that garner my respect or support?

    Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better donated to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about bettering the world.

    see point above. you hold FOSS too highly as if the people who create these projects are impervious to corruption or greed. these are regular people like you or me. they have goals and dreams they want to achieve too, and sometimes the projects they started become vessels for them to achieve those dreams.

    Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.

    You’re just repeating yourself now.

    my point is, there cannot be light without darkness. FOSS and proprietary software are two halves of the same coin. to be so blinded by principles or to fool yourself with some moral superiority complex is only going to make things worse.

    use what you need to solve the problems you have. sometimes that includes using vendor locked solutions. it’s not wrong, it’s just life.

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    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of “openness”. it’s stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it’s happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.

      “you could technically argue”??? That’s literally, unambiguously the law. That’s how the licensing works. This isn’t a technicality; it’s a fundamental, widely understood feature of the license. On top of that, licenses like the GPL have extremely stringent requirements for changing the license. (Here, Jellyfin uses GPLv2, so we’ll go with that.)

      Everyone with work in the current codebase has copyright over that work under the GPLv2. Nobody relinquishes that to some centralized entity. Thus, you have two options for every single individual person whose contributions are still extant in your project: 1) get their consent not just to relicense but to the specific license you want, or 2) remove their work from the project either because you can no longer contact them or because they’ve said no.

      The fact that you called this process “stupid easy” for anything but the smallest, most insular project is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard today, and I’m not even wasting my time with the rest of your comment given how shockingly willing you are to not just speak about things you have zero understanding of but to somehow arrive at the most false statement possible about them.

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      • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        cool. go be angry somewhere else.

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