Paying won't guarantee you the soft you pay for won't switch business model for subscription, or sell to a bigger company that will extinguish it.

Not paying for software all but guarantees that it will be abandoned at one point. People want to eat, after all.

(The dichotomy between "I must earn a gazillion dollars because I'm a senior dev" and "I will not pay money (that pays those salaries) for software" that's so prevalent on HN is mind boggling)

Yes Linux and Vim are dead. There are also no other examples of long lived open source projects that are free.

Linux is primarily developed by large corporations.

And there are significantly more projects that have stagnated and disappeared than those that survived.

Whether a project is free or not is not the only consideration as to whether I adopt it for my workflow, just a core one.

I paid $75 for plex 9 years ago and have gotten way more than my monies worth. Their shift to monetization In my opinion is over blown. You can simply go and turn that crap off. Having my media on any device at any time is a life changer. Especially with small kids.

From what I've been told a lot of the frustration is that you can't simply turn it off for your server, all your users have to do it individually. If you've set it up for non-techie people who don't live nearby I can see how that'd be pretty annoying to deal with.

I have some copy pasta with screen shots on how to turn that stuff off I spent a bit making. Just send that out and let people know respectfully that I’m not providing tech support and I hope they enjoy the service. I don’t have anyone bug me ever.

For all we know, OP is donating to all the projects that accept donations.

That's a non sequitur. I was talking about financial constraints of the company, not the user. I'd have no problem paying for a piece of critical software if they contractually guaranteed that they wouldn't break the functionality and/or litter it with ads, or at least make it open source if they do. It has nothing to do with my personal financial constraints. That's a misinterpretation on your part.

"Financial constraints" of a company, any company, are such that:

- development costs money

- workplaces cost money

- people want to eat

You can pay for Plex with money (Plex Pass). And while I sort of dislike them pushing their own content and monetization, it can be easily switched off in settings.

Apparently a free model works perfectly well. I am using Jellyfin happily. Why should I use Plex when Jellyfin works without all the cruft? The developers working on Jellyfin are doing perfectly fine in their endeavors. Is your suggestion that a project is deserving of more use if it is paid for rather than free? Are free projects poisoning the well for all of us trying to make money off of software? Not sure what point you are trying to make.

> The developers working on Jellyfin are doing perfectly fine in their endeavors.

As long as they have something to keep them above poverty line: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html (among other articles, the question of how free open source isn't sustainable is discussed often)