64 replies
8h58m
Not happy about this post. Instead of asking to stop, they should do just what they suggest, without further ado - distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit. Make it transparent, make application to these funds posssible, make feature bounties, write it besides the donation button.
Once someone stops donating, it is unlikely they will put up the effort of continually researching on which client/dev to support. This would be much better handled by Jellyfin maintainers.
If I donated to a specific project or organization, I would feel seriously deceived if they turned around and donated that money elsewhere. This is the correct move
Even if you donated to Jellyfin, and the money went to the developers of Jellyfin clients, which are listed everywhere as part of the project?
I'd prefer to donate to the clients I use - there are many I wouldn't use (for whatever reason) and so donations to them do not help my goals. For that matter there are causes completely unrelated to jellyfin that I also support: knowing jellyfin has enough money frees to some money to donate to those other causes.
There are more deserving projects in the world than there is money. If you don't want to manage who gets the money directly (this could be called micromanage!) then something like united way which redonates to projects that you haven't heard of is probably a good use of your money. (United way is controversial and they do not support open source but they are still a good use of your money if you want to do the most good with the least thought)
If you're trying to make a donation to a project but want to be able to specify what they can(not) do with the money, then you're not really trying to make a donation.
"Here are some groceries, bring them home to your children and don't trade them for drugs"
Is a donation even if the other party is upset about it.
There's a whiff of a suggestion with this comment that makes it seem like the intent is to frame it as a contradiction of the comment it's a reply to, but it isn't.
If I bought a cheeseburger, I would feel seriously deceived if they turned around and bought cheese from a diary provider and buns from a bakery and...
Jellyfin of course spends the money on ingredients that go into the project: “if you do want to help us cover some operating expenses like our VPS hosting, domains, developer licenses, metadata API keys, and other incidental expenses, check out our OpenCollective page to donate.” https://jellyfin.org/contribute/
Why would anyone feel deceived?
It's one thing if you donate to wikipedia and it ends up at some random wikimedia project you've never heard of and a completely different thing if you donate to Jellyfin and it ends up at Jellyfin Android.
But as others have said, the hax office might not like it
It may be a bit different, but there's still plenty of potential for people to donate and not be happy that their donation is forwarded to a third party Jellyfin Android if they personally have no interest in the existence of Jellyfin Android.
(I also agree with various other reasons in other people's comments, most of all that this lets donors vote with their money on which third party projects that work on top of Jellyfin get the money, rather than Jellyfin having to decide which ones deserve what proportion of spare money.)
They could donate to their dependencies that need it?
Still directly supporting the code running in the project. Balances out that people seem happier to donate to the UI/product layer than something like ffmpeg. Might be a bad example, but I’m sure some of their dependencies are underfunded.
And even then, redistributing money will inherently make the organization have political issues. Choosing who "deserves" it is just hard work, takes time, needs an internal political alignment and strategy where the people working on this project are just doing it for fun on their free time.
In fact their decision is pretty mature and nice : they have enough to support the project costs but they don’t want the project to become their job and that’s exactly what money flowing over a hobby does : changing it to a job.
Mozilla is a prime example of this.
I think many have donated to Mozilla thinking they were donating to Firefox only to later realize donations never reach Firefox.
Except the IRS may step in and spoil the idea ...
If Jellyfin operated as a 501c3 charity, the IRS would have standing to ensure that funds were used in accordance with those requirements.
I couldn’t find evidence that they do. If you donate money to me (not a 501c3) because you like something I do and want me to keep doing it, I can do anything (legal) with that money without IRS comment. (However, your donation to me is not deductible to you.)
But then you have to tax the donation as your income; after that, you can redistribute and the receiving party has to tax it again... that's what charities are shielded against.
By donating directly, there's one income tax layer removed.
But if Jellyfin isn't a registered 501(c) charity, then the point is moot.
There are many different options to register jellyfin in the US, and many other options to register in other countries. Each as their own set of rules. If Jellyfin isn't registered in any way then the law gets even more complex (if you are registered anywhere other countries will generally recognize that and accept the laws of where you registered apply, but if not registered nobody knows but the lawyers can spend millions fighting it out)
If it's able to be treated as a gift, it is not taxable to the recipient. I an not a tax professional, but I would expect most of what people call "donations" to Jellyfin would be considered gifts by the tax court.
Why do you think Jellyfin would operates out of the US? I would say the majority of core devs isn't even located on the American continent.
I'm not clear what exactly you mean. However every country has their own equivalent of the IRS with their own rules. I'm not going to look up the legal structure of Jellyfin (boring...), but whatever it is there are legal rules as to what they can do with any money they get.
Love jellyfin but don’t understand some of their choices like abandoning Reddit for a forum with no traffic
A dedicated forum, open to read without login, and controlled by the project. They have easy access to all their data, decision-making power on features to support, and it's their call whether or not to allow advertising (they don't) or AI training of their data.
Seems like a perfectly good place for it to me.
We definitely need more forums. And with Discourse being a huge improvement over BB and other forum software from the 90s, it's not hard to set up multiple forum accounts and even tie them to some other login if you want.
Why would they want to use Reddit?
The forum has 10000 users and averages around 30-40 posts a day ... i would not say thats "no traffic"
Reddit isn’t conducive to many types of conversations due to the voting mechanism for posts and comments.
I understand abandoning reddit in any situation
That sounds like a lot of work which could lead to people complaining that their money didn’t go where they wanted it to go. This is simpler.
And if they decide to split the donations equally, a few crappy clients would get made, just to get a slice of the pie.
And if they decided to only support official clients, plenty of other people would complain why their favourite third-party client didn't get anything.
It's almost as if wealth distribution is not a easy thing , even on a simple OSS project.
It is not indeed. Also being a politician is not easy: you will be criticized by someone whatever you say or do.
Spending it on other projects is a bad idea:
- it'd be distracting, they're open source devs/maintainers not fund managers
- it could be divisive and they'd risk taking flak if they get it "wrong"
- it creates a class of "approved" clients and related projects
I think the Jellyfin team's approach is pretty reasonable.
That said, if I was them I'd probably do what the Helix devs do [0] and rather than telling people to stop donating, remind them that donations are a "tip" to the project and shouldn't be assumed to be buying you anything or paying to ramp up development (or marketing or anything else). I really appreciate that stance and their attitude that it's great to have the money and they'll spend it if and when they need it, while also encouraging people to consider donating elsewhere if they want to have a bigger impact.
[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2220
Exactly. This is something we've discussed internally a LOT and this is basically my take as to why not to distribute the money elsewhere, with the added #4 of "people who donated to us, donated to us - is it really right to take their money and give it to other projects, even if we think it is?".
Yes. I'm not sure what a donation is for, if not for the recipient to spend as they see fit. And this isn't a matter of spending donor money on unrelated but deserving causes - as you say, supporting clients supports the ecosystem.
I understand the argument that deciding who gets the money and how much is nontrivial and perhaps better left up to individual donors, but I disagree that it would be dishonest or misappropriating funds if you were to do so.
Exactly this! It is extra responsibility which distracts from the core project.
And spending on other projects might create tax problems for them, their donors and maybe the other projects...
IMO they should probably put their thinking hat on and try to find a way of spending more money. If the community says they want $20,000 spent on some project; then spend it. Buy some ads or something. In theory a project funded by donations is best run at around break even. This is a signal from their supporters that they should be spending more.
$20000 isn't a useful amount of money. If they are getting $20k/month they can think about hiring a developer to work full time on the project, but at their current donation levels they could hire a developer for maybe 3 weeks before they run dangerously low on money.
Remember, Jellyfin is a fork of Emby which was a fork of Plex - both those projects were open source and then went paid. After being burnt twice like that I think it is understandable why many Jellyfin developers have had enough of that and will reject anything that even slightly could be seen as going paid. So while hiring someone might be possible and in the best interest of Jellyfin in a different world, they cannot do that in this world without losing support.
Emby was not a fork. Plex server has never been open source.
That is assuming people are donating money to change the project rather than support the project as it already is.
The money doesn't have to be spent just because it's there. Personally I'd be a little annoyed if I donted to a project and the only change they made was to burn the cash on advertising that they otherwise didn't do.
I agree, it would be nice to make it easy to donate, and then the donations are spread to others within the ecosystem. But perhaps they're worried about a ruckus when they choose to make a donation someone doesn't agree with, so they'd need to have a layer of bureaucracy that they don't want to manage.
I don't think that it is the job of Jellyfish but it would be nice to have a foundation dedicated to do that for all projects.
Especially in Europe where you can get a nice tax deduction but only if you do the donation to a well (and complexly) registered non profit
Don't we have that with Patreon, GitHub Sponsors?
No. Tax deduction effectively excludes middlemen if they don't exclusively distribute to tax-deductible purposes. And at least in Germany, the hurdle is high, as is the risk of being retroactively declared non-deductible, after which you need to pay all the retroactive taxes, usually bankrupting your org and even the middle-men.
I instead like what they did: they were transparent about their finances and told their supporters that there are others that would benefit more from their support at this time. They were under no obligation of doing this, but it likely felt them like the right thing to do.
Yeah, they could have done what e.g. the Wikimedia foundation does (find ways to spend the money and keep asking for more), but they didn't. Saying "we're good, we have all the money we need for the time being" is very refreshing...
I remember reading an article about that, how Jimmy Wales was driving super expensive sportscars around and such - it made me pretty much resolve to never donate to them. Ever.
Not withstanding the super aggressive please for cash every September or whenever they do it.
What is the connection between Jimmy Wales’ personal spending choices and your decision to never donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? As far as I can tell, Wales is not paid by the Wikimedia Foundation.
When you accept donations you have to be transparent about how it is going to be used. They cannot change their mind like that.
They can't do it retroactively for already received donations (not ethically at least, I don't think it would be illegal in this situation), but it wouldn't at all be a problem for them to announce "donations from today on will be used in this new way" instead of making the announcement they just made.
(I personally think they made the right choice, am just responding to your comment disagreeing that it would be a transparency issue if they changed how things worked moving forwards.)
Probably not. The amount of money they are taking in is very small, and if they start to ramp up revenue, then they actually need to start paying people for non-core work, like lawyers and accountants. Assuming that the money is received in Canada, by an Ontario registered non-profit, then it is really easy to do the accounting work for small dollar amounts (I ran several Manitoba and BC based non-profits previously for conferences and community work). If you start paying people who can't invoice you, then you need to sort out cross-jurisdictional payroll, and if you are making alot of purchases through other services.
Comments like this are unhelpful because it assumes that the developer of the project has a desire to run a business (and non-profits are businesses) rather than building and shipping an open source tool that scratches an itch. It's cool to speculate on what could be, but if you think that is the right approach, fork it, run the business transparently, and allocate a portion of revenue to be held in reserve the moment the core team for the project you forked asks for it.
Great example of how taking people's money leads to new expectations!
I mean they say in the post that you should donate to clients right?
What you suggest is closer to fraud to me than the right thing to do. If I donate to a project, it's not for the maintainer to choose to to use the money for something else.
Footing the legal costs of making sure that doing such complies with the open collective policies, the policies of the group OC is delegating management to, their prior statements, etc, would easily take up such a small amount, leaving nothing for no one.
They should probably do both.
Make an announcement like this, but add that beyond x years of runway the remaining donations will be funneled to the community projects.
His contrarian post got to front page of Hacker news. I think he won. His message to redirect funds to sub-maintainers is being heard.
How do you know he's not already donating the extra?
If I was running a popular open-source project, I wouldn't make it public that I've got extra money that I'm giving away. That comes with all sort of complications...
So like Mozilla? Then you got people complaining that they can't donate just to the project they support instead of the others.
money and foss greybeards don't mix.
Additional admin that will lead to more costs in a self-fulfilling cycle. This is a bad idea. People who are donating are already doing so with intent. Trying to gues where their money would be best placed is playing unnecessary financial games. They're a software developer, not a pension fund manager.
They're already using the client just as they're using Jellyfin, how is this any more effort than what they've put into donating to Jellyfin directly?
It sounds like they have a general policy of "no paid dev". Further, it's possible that part of the motivation is the belief that if they did have it, it might lead to negative consequences (fewer contributions from non paid devs, squabbles over compensation, generally having to manage payouts etc)