I am interested in acquiring the source code for Plex Media Server and I've found that to be rather difficult. It turns out that Plex, Inc does not release the source code for Plex Media Server. It's clear that Plex Media Server utilizes FFMPEG, which is licensed under LGPL v2.1 and certain optimization components are licensed under GPL v2. If these components are NOT utilized, then Plex must be compiling FFMPEG without the "--enable-gpl" and "--enable-nonfree" flags enabled. If these optimization components are utilized by Plex Media Server (and I personally believe that they are), then the GPL applies to Plex Media Server.
Bottom line is this: if the GPL requires public disclosure of source code, then why is the source code for Plex Media Server not publicly available?
To be clear, including the GPL v2 and LGPL v2.1 licenses in the distribution of Plex Media Server is NOT sufficient to comply with the relevant licenses and disclosure of source code is required to become fully compliant. If this is an issue that should not be discussed publicly, I'd really appreciate it if a Plex dev could reach out to me and explain this discrepancy.
I am interested in acquiring the source code for Plex Media Server and I've found that to be rather difficult. It turns out that Plex, Inc does not release the source code for Plex Media Server. It's clear that Plex Media Server utilizes FFMPEG, which is licensed under LGPL v2.1 and certain optimization components are licensed under GPL v2. If these components are NOT utilized, then Plex must be compiling FFMPEG without the "--enable-gpl" and "--enable-nonfree" flags enabled. If these optimization components are utilized by Plex Media Server (and I personally believe that they are), then the GPL applies to Plex Media Server.
Bottom line is this: if the GPL requires public disclosure of source code, then why is the source code for Plex Media Server not publicly available?
To be clear, including the GPL v2 and LGPL v2.1 licenses in the distribution of Plex Media Server is NOT sufficient to comply with the relevant licenses and disclosure of source code is required to become fully compliant. If this is an issue that should not be discussed publicly, I'd really appreciate it if a Plex dev could reach out to me and explain this discrepancy.
We use ffmpeg two ways:
1) we compile with disable-gpl and link to the libraries for metadata extraction. Since this is now LGPL we don't have to publish the source for the media server.
2) we build Plex New Transcoder (which is basically the ffmpeg binary) with enable-gpl. The server then executes this binary but never links to it. This source we publish to comply with GPL. I don't have the link handy to the source right here but I will update this post when I have it.
Thanks Dane. Like I said in the original post, I'm aware that the appropriate license is being distributed with the software, and that's great. I was mostly looking for the legal rationale by which Plex Inc believes it is permitted to profit from distributing licensed, open source software without releasing its own source code (which is less than great). I was confident that such a legal rationale couldn't possibly hold up across all jurisdictions in the United States (especially in the Northern District Court of California where a lot of cases like this actually go to trial). It would appear I was (unfortunately) incorrect, and Plex is not legally obligated to release the source code for works derived from FFMPEG. Thanks again to Tobias for clearing this up.
Now, having said that, a lot of the features and functionality that the community (rather hackily) attempts to add to Plex could be supplemented through some minor changes in the server's source code, but apparently that's some sort of divine scripture that only Plex developers themselves may gaze upon. There are a laundry list of reasons why releasing the source code would make the Plex ecosystem more successful/competitive, but (as far as I can tell) the only reason not to is because Plex is not legally obligated to do so. It would be great if Plex Inc released the source code for Plex Media Server upon request to third party developers who believe that they have a compelling, non-trivial contribution to make to Plex's functionality that cannot be accomplished through modifying code that has already been open-sourced. I'd like to know what the pushback from Plex devs is like against such an idea.
To be clear, I understand that Plex Inc believes it is LEGALLY PERMITTED to keep the Plex Media Server closed source, but I personally believe that this is fundamentally inconsistent with the nature of this community and what it's trying to accomplish.
Sure, and again, thanks for that. But if I may ask, what's your opinion on responsible third party contributions to the closed source server component of Plex? I haven't seen the closed-sourced-ness of the server side discussed much in these forums so if it's not an issue to anyone else then I'll be quiet and go home... I just think that there are competitive opportunities to improve Plex as a platform in meaningful ways through open sourcing server code.
I agree open source is better, but plex is the only game out there that does everything it does. If they open sourced this, what do you think would happen to the developers reveune stream. FFMPEG has been developed in a way that allows for this, so there isn't a huge issue. As long as they provide sources on request of anything they modified that was gpl'd, than it's all golden.
So I think people really appreciate what the plex group has done. I mean originally it was a fork of xbmc anyways right?
