Comment on That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 2 weeks agoTake HomeAssistant for example: you’re free to use it self-hosted, but as soon as you want to expose it securely through the Internet, there’s need from infrastructure that has costs, both materials and labor. In HomeAssistant’s case, it’s NabuCasa that does it, costs money, and helps fund the work of Home Assistant developers.
Having things free (libre) and open source is a blessing, but we have become entitled to have work of very specialized people for free. That’s not always feasible.
Another example, Zabbix, is totally open source and free, they only charge for support and training if you ask for them. It has worked for them for many years, but if they start to struggle with funding, I’d understand if they charged for it.
techwithjake@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Home Assistant doesn’t require to pay for anything at any point in time for any reason. If you want to expose your instance to the web, they have all the documents on how to do it yourself. There’s absolutely nothing “hidden” behind a paywall. The only reason to say is if you want Nabu Casa to handle exposing your instance to the internet and various cloud services like Google Assistant/Alexa. The reason to pay Nabu Casa is if you don’t have the technical know how (or lazy like me) and to help fund Home Assistant (which I want).
That’s all to say that Plex and Home Assistant are not similar in their pay scheme. It’d be more akin if Jellyfin started charging users to allow a one click way to stream outside the home with no obligation to.