We have quite a budget collected over the last 5 years, and while we're really happy to see so many in the Jellyfin community contribute to us, we want to ask you to stop!
No, really. We don't actually need your money. At least, not here and now.
We have over $24,000 in the bank, and with average monthly expenses of only ~$600, that's over 40 months (3.3 years) of runway! So, we have plenty of money for the near future.
Thus, at this time, we want you to seriously consider donating to the authors of Clients you use, instead of (or in addition to) the main project. Client support is the hardest part of the Jellyfin ecosystem to keep going, and most of them are maintained by only a single person or very small team. With the API changes in 10.9.0 and the upcoming 10.10.0 releases, they're going to be very busy trying to keep up, and thus could really use your support in a way that the core project here doesn't right now.
So, if there's a client you use every day and that you love, consider finding it's author in our list of official clients, and sending them a little something instead (or too).
No, this doesn't violate our policy of "no paid development", because donations are just that - donations. We will still not honour bug bounties or similar, and still not use our collective finance here for paid development. So don't feel like you're doing something wrong, you're not!
I'll leave this notice up until we drop to ~1 year (12 months) of remaining runway, at which time we can re-evaluate where we're at.
Happy watching!
I personally would rather see then take some of the "extra" money and apportion it to suitable client projects themselves, but I can understand them not wanting to become financial administrators in that way.
I fully agree with everything you said. I too have contributed countless hours to open source for personal enjoyment or for the good of the community and never been paid a cent.
The thing I lament is this sense I've seen in some circles that accepting donations or getting paid is somehow shameful. That the mere act of being compensated somehow diminishes the contribution. You can be paid and do it for the love of coding and do it for the benefit of everyone.
Everyone has the right to refuse payment, and people who do's wishes need to be respected. And I don't know the beliefs of the Jellyfin devs. But to me, a post like this feeds into that vague feeling that being paid somehow makes your contributions less "pure" or "desirable", than if you're solely doing it for fun or selfless reasons.
It's my strong belief that for open source alternatives to truly take off and go toe to toe with big tech, there needs to be a robust funding model underpinning it. If we as a community even see accepting donations as somehow "lesser than", what chance do we have of ever getting there?