Per the pricing plan, all licenses are forever licenses, but the lowest two tiers only offer 1 year of updates.
After that you can choose to renew, or continue with your current version.
If you do not like subscriptions, there still a lifetime plan, but at a higher pricepoint.
All existing plans are grandfathered in.
Full announcement form Lime: https://unraid.net/blog/pricing-change
Note: I have mixed emotions about this, but I’m seeing a lot of rage bait, and if we’re going to rage we might as well have our facts straight.
If you haven’t subbed already and are interested, check out the unraid community at !unraid@reddthat.com. We are already discussing it over there too.
I’m fine with this. The old model was great and unsustainable. They are switching with the explicit goal of not taking VC money, which is a good thing in any context.
My biggest problem is security updates.
The “x years of upgrades” model is okay when it’s for an app, where you can just keep using it with the old feature set and no harm is done.
But Unraid isn’t an app, it’s a whole operating system.
With this new licensing model, over time we will see many people sticking with old versions because they dont want to pay to renew - and then what happens when critical security vulnerabilities are found?
The question was already asked on the Unraid forum thread, and the answer from them on whether they would provide security updates for non-latest versions was basically “we don’t know” - due to how much effort they would need to spend to individually fix all those old versions, and the team size it would require.
It’s going to be a nightmare.
Any user who cares about good security practice is effectively going to be forced to pay to renew, because the alternative will be to leave yourself potentially vulnerable.
At which point such an user might already be looking at TrueNAS/DIY setups TBH
This is where I’m conflicted. Software development is hard and it’s expensive. I completely understand that the old model was unsustainable.
HOWEVER - I’ve seen this a dozen times before. They make a move that’s not great but it is understandable with the community. It’s the next move that I worry about, when all of a sudden there is a subscription, or those old “lifetime” plans suddenly aren’t lifetime. I remember PlayOn TV suddenly saying “Well now it’s PlayOn Home. That’s a new product, so you did get the lifetime of the old PlayOn TV! So we didn’t really reneg on our deal!” Immediately in the garbage.
So, I’ll be staying on for now… with a big “we’ll fuckin’ see” in the next few years.
Me over here with a lifetime plex pass: “…uhhh, did you just feel that?”
Just learn a simple reverse proxy and swap out for jellyfin. Other than Plex not handling the user subscription/account side (privacy!) it’s basically the same thing with some small edge cases like people with WebOS TVs and shit.
Unpopular but I’ve tried hard to switch to JF cold-turkey, twice, and both times it looks and acts like a hobby project. It’s so far behind the curve it’s rather upsetting, as that seems to be the ‘best’ we have for foss options.
Settings (all of them, global application or library) have way too many options with way too little explanation to what they do. With categories, either use them or don’t, but like 6 categories for everything and you scroll through 25 settings isn’t ‘categorization’ it’s just a mess; can we get a nested menu please. No simple dvr solution - I shouldn’t be required to pay a separate company a monthly fee for guide info. The UI screams ‘my designer is also a developer’ like it has a face only a mother can love. For https setup unless you know to just run a reverse proxy (I didn’t the first time), the instructions might as well be a rubix cube compared to plex’s execution. The metadata it pulls is alright I guess, but by that point I had already thrown in the towel. Oh yeah, hardware acceleration requiring manual setup is just no bueno; at this point it’s like I’m taking a half-done Lego set and finishing it because my kid got bored and took a nap, and because I don’t value my time enough I see it through to the end.
I want it to get better, genuinely, but damn does it have a way to go.