I can understand wanting to be able to see the source code for the library so you can get in there and muck about and tweak it to your liking, BUT, I’ve seen far too many posts in these forums where people are complaining about price or worried about being charged for the library.
If this new library is as great as Elan’s blog post indicates, these guys have done a serious amount of work and they deserve to be paid handsomely for it. It sounds as though this new system could rival a Kaleidescape system (and, because of all of the online content, maybe even surpass it?). K’Scape starts at $20k, which includes enough storage for about 100 DVDs. This is, so far, free.
Personally, I’d rather pay for a license to support development so that at least a couple of the devs could start working on Plex full-time. Yes, there’s the donate button, but, that’s not a business model and donations are too random (and probably too light) to make payroll and pay rent.
My only concern about making Plex a paid app is access to IMDB metadata. Because Plex is a free app, I don’t believe they’re violating the IMDB’s Terms of Use. However, if it were to become a paid app, my understanding is that they could no longer scrape metadata from IMDB without violating the Terms of Use. The next step would be to license metadata from a source like AMG, but those licenses are extremely expensive.
Looking forward to the new library.
Brad
