They currently have 3 years of runway but that’s ridding on the high of the announcement and this communication will dry up donations. Plus, they ask people to donate to clients instead of the core product but they could do so themselves with the money they receive.
Why? Not everything has to be a subscription or a hyper growth business, not every product needs to do everything. If they and their users are happy with the cadence, and have a war chest of 3 years operating costs assuming 100% of funding stopped then why not divert attention to other projects in the ecosystem that might need the funding more?
3 years is nothing especially if you intentionally kill your donations. They won’t come back magically when they will need them.
Plus as stated before, they can divert the money to other projects related to Jellyfin themselves. They don’t need the community to do that for them.
Honestly, if you are a project the size of Jellyfin and you ask donations to stop because you have a measly three years of operational runway without funding anything and without any idea of what to do with the money, I seriously question your ability to survive.
>They won’t come back magically when they will need them.
With the kind of goodwill they're building here I'm inclined to doubt that. People want to naturally cheer for the good guy and it's hard not to see an open source passion project led by these fellas as not being the good guy.
People don't magically cheer for the "good guy" whatever that means.
People give to projects they know about and have visibility. Now, if Jellyfin actually needs money, they will have to do a huge outreach push to overcome their own message that they don't need money.
If I donated to project X and they redistributed my funds to related project Y, I'd be mildly peeved. Only mildly, mind, but the way they're doing it here is exactly the right way, imho.
They have made it clear they dont want to decide which clients get what proportion of money, and are asking their users to do that for them by directly donating to the clients they most use or prefer.
It’s a young project. They still have wind in their sails from the time they forked Emby and can still ride on the hope such a fork brought. That’s not going to last forever. I’m already seeing a lot more comments saying people switched back to Plex than I used to including in this very discussion.
I dont think thats what they mean at all. Jellyfin was forked and released in 2018. Its not a young project and certainly not still 'riding high' on the excitement of a new fork.
They havent said dont donate, they have said donate to client maintainers instead.
As they point out in the post, Jellyfins No1 problem is keeping their clients up to date with new features and design polish.
They have identified that the money being donated to them would be much better donated to the maintainers of the clients to encourage them to do more/better work, but they dont feel its right that they choose how that is distributed and they want the users to donate to the client they favour most. I think this is great, and hopefully some of the clients which have been dragging recently can get some donations and encourage some fresh development on them.
They currently have 3 years of runway but that’s ridding on the high of the announcement and this communication will dry up donations. Plus, they ask people to donate to clients instead of the core product but they could do so themselves with the money they receive.