[Alex]: all right welcome into bit flip episode seven as you might tell we're in person well kind of jeff is calling in from pennsylvania he couldn't join us today but we are in stephen's garage
[Stephen]: we sure are
[Alex]: studio
[Stephen]: studio office office office office
[Alex]: Honestly, considering the last half an hour of technical shenanigans, the fact that we are recording anything at all to that camera or that camera or that camera, I hope one of them worked, is kind of a minor miracle. And of course, we have Jeff here doing the Marshall from How I Met Your Mother moment.
[Alex]: So yes, Adam and I flew into Toronto this morning and we drove up to see Stephen and his little MSP data center, that kind of thing. And tomorrow I'm in town for Toronto Tech Week, where I'm giving a talk at the Tailscale meetup downtown.
[Alex]: And it'd be rude not to have dinner with friends, right? Absolutely. Jeff, you've got the first topic.
[Geoff]: I do.
[Geoff]: So, Alex, I heard that Plex did some things this week. Did they, you know, cause some drama on the internet? They've never done that before, have they?
[Alex]: Boy, howdy did Plex have a week. You know, It's not even so much that they raised their lifetime cost to $750.
[Alex]: It's more that they took so long to do it before they've admitted to us really what they value the lifetime product at. I've done several videos on the topic. I'm almost kind of bored of talking about it, to be honest with you. But what I want to do is actually get your guys' takes on it. So I started using Plex. In fact, it was probably my gateway drug into self-hosting altogether, to be honest with you.
[Alex]: It was the playback of media that kind of drew me into running Unraid back in the day with mismatched drive sizes and all that stuff. And Plex has been the one constant throughout my entire self-hosting journey. So I wanted to ask you both a little bit about the lifetime stuff, but also how you got started with Plex.
[Adam]: I got started, so I remember I got started with Plex when I worked at Santa Cruz County Data Center and my good friend Mitchell was a Plex believer before I was. And I had already dipped the toe pretty hard into the self-hosting because There's the storage admin there and I found FreeNAS as we've talked about before.
[Adam]: And when I found Plex plus FreeNAS, it was just like chef's kiss. Perfect. So I pretty quickly bought the lifetime pass, I think. In fact, I don't think I ever paid for anything but the lifetime pass back then. And this is back, dang, 13 years ago? It's
[Alex]: a long time.
[Alex]: Plex has been around for a long time. Longer than I thought. Elan Feingold started the project as a fork of XBMC in 2008.
[Alex]: I actually remember going to a thrift store and buying an old original Xbox with the entire intent of flashing that thing with XBMC back in the day. I wasn't very good at working with hardware back then. And I remember this is when I was unemployed. So the 2008 crash had just happened. So this must have been in 2009. We didn't even have 20 quid to go to the supermarket and buy groceries.
[Adam]: This is the original Xbox, right?
[Alex]: Yeah.
[Adam]: The old school one. But they
[Alex]: were in charity shops. There's a shop in England called Computer Exchange, C-E-X. And they were selling Xboxes for like 30 pounds. So this was like my toy for the next six weeks, months maybe, because we were really hard up.
[Alex]: And I remember I took the thing apart. I took a massive screw out of it and I dropped it on the power supply.
[Alex]: I didn't know anything about what power supply. I knew nothing. So the capacitor was wide open and pop, smoke, dead.
[Adam]: But you're not dead, so that's good.
[Alex]: Clearly.
[Adam]: Because that could have been the outcome of that situation. Yeah, that would have tickled. Yeah.
[Alex]: Yeah, I didn't know what I was doing. And it was very, very evident. But anyway, Plex has been one of those things that's been in our lives for a while. What about you?
[Stephen]: So, interestingly, I did the whole Xbox thing. I had one of the translucent green ones. It was like a limited edition one.
[Adam]: That was the cool one.
[Stephen]: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I worked for EB Games, which is like a... I know EB Games. Right, of course. Well, yeah, it got big. Anyway, so I worked there and I was able to get one. But I remember getting into it first off because you could just replace the ribbon cable.
[Stephen]: because they had the IDE cable that had less, uh, less lines in it. And so if you put the, the faster IDE cable in it, games loaded faster. Anyway, I digress. So, uh, load that on there and I tried the XBMC stuff, but I didn't, I didn't love it compared to what I was using, which was literally just, I had a computer with a bunch of hard drives and it was like a file server.
[Stephen]: It was windows.
[Stephen]: Uh, and I just used, um, windows media player classic.
[Alex]: For
[Stephen]: some reason, I just preferred that over having to open up a menu system on some Xbox thing and then go through it. I was just like, no, I can just double click it in the file system and it was fine. But so I just dropped the whole media server thing for a good long while until one day I discovered that, wait, people are using this other thing called Plex.
[Stephen]: and it allows you to do things remotely and you could share it with a friend. Then it became a thing that I actually really wanted to work on and develop. But before then, I just didn't even care about a media server.
[Alex]: I'm so glad you brought up Windows Media Center. I farted around for years with Media Center and there was a plugin for it called Media Browser.
[Alex]: I think.
[Alex]: Yes.
[Alex]: I wonder if that's the same media browser that MB is related to.
[Geoff]: No, that is exactly. That was my gateway. So I started with Windows Media Center as well because I had a cable card.
[Geoff]: I got one of those tuners, like the HD Home Run. So I was getting my cable through that and doing a whole bunch of stuff with that. And then I was like, well, I kind of want to move beyond this. I want to start doing, I have a bunch of DVDs I'd like to be able to watch. And so I got into MB because MB was me, you know, the media browser of that's how it kind of became a thing.
[Geoff]: And that was kind of my gateway drug to doing. I never actually got into Plex. I was MB into Jellyfin. So I had MB. I think I went back. I bought MB when they came out with their lifetime thing in 2015, which is like when they first did that.
[Geoff]: But before then it had been completely free. So again, I never really got, I mean, I know Plex had the whole polish thing, but what, I mean, what drew you guys to MB over, I mean, to Plex over like MB?
[Geoff]: Well, MB didn't
[Alex]: exist.
[Alex]: Yeah.
[Alex]: Oh, okay.
[Alex]: Windows Media Center was, I think there's a few things that happened. One was that XBMC moved on to this thing called LibreELEC, although I think it was called RaspBMC when the first Raspberry Pi came out, a chap called Sam Nazarko.
[Alex]: Did that.
[Alex]: He and I used to talk quite a bit back in the day, actually. In fact, it was on the RaspBMC forums that the random forum generator name of ironicbadger came from.
[Alex]: No way.
[Alex]: Yeah, a little bit of history for you all. That's where ironicbadger came from. um so that was when the raspberry pi one came out and i remember we we i was still renting dvds and blu-rays from netflix via the mail at that
[Adam]: point
[Alex]: because i remember ripping them and putting them onto my server i mean which was unraid version
[Adam]: five i think oh really version five of unraid back then
[Alex]: uh with the pre-clear plug-in and all that because my my broadband where i lived at that point in exeter in england was three four hundred kilobits It was pretty dreadful. I went from Manchester where I had 50 meg down to Exeter where I was in the sticks and I had just nothing.
[Alex]: So I had to do the mail order discs to even be able to watch anything.
[Adam]: And I think
[Alex]: what's interesting in this whole discussion is how Plex has fitted into the wider landscape of streaming in
[Adam]: the
[Alex]: last 15 years.
[Alex]: Because we've gone from Netflix being a mail order disk service to now being a multinational conglomerate media streaming Goliath up there with Disney and HBO and Paramount and all these things. And the landscape around Plex has changed a great deal. And I think, you know, in addition to the stuff that happened with them taking $50 million of funding and all the rest of it, like just the world around Plex has changed so much.
[Alex]: It's kind of amazing they've lasted this long,
[Adam]: really.
[Adam]: I would argue that it's amazing that nobody else has come up to be like a serious challenger to that throne too. Like I'd
[Alex]: say
[Adam]: Jellyfin, yes, but it's also completely free. And it's still not fully at parity if we're being real about
[Alex]: it.
[Alex]: Well, I am starting a new thing on my YouTube channel called Jellyfin June. We'll talk about it on the show. Don't worry. But the idea is on June the 1st, which is probably very soon after you watch this episode, assuming you watch it on the day it comes out.
[Alex]: It's very presumptuous of me. june the 1st i will ceremoniously do a live stream where i delete plex and it that's it it's going to be it's going to be gone my idea is to in do multiple videos multiple streams investigating all of the different jellyfin clients you know there'll be one video about tv os clients there'll be another one about ios clients it'll be separate blocks
[Alex]: because the client experience is where it all hinges the server side yeah okay jellyfin isn't as pretty as plex in the browser but who
[Adam]: cares
[Alex]: who's going to the browser i know someone in the comment yeah okay there you go
[Geoff]: honestly so what i do is i like i have like you know i have like an hour lunch break and i like to watch like a you know a half hour show so i'm usually using the web browser to watch my shows when i'm at the office
[Alex]: But does the beauty of that web interface materially matter to you? Right.
[Geoff]: No, no.
[Geoff]: And
[Alex]: going back to RaspBMC for a second, actually, I think the reason that we all moved off Windows Media Center through RaspBMC to Plex and now maybe Jellyfin is because of this thing called a 10-foot interface. And it's the fact that you can use these streaming services like Netflix and Prime and all that are built around that 10-foot interface.
[Alex]: Like that's how they interface with their customers. Yes, they have phone apps and all the rest of it too, of course. But I would wager the majority of people are watching TV, funnily enough, on their TV.
[Alex]: And they don't want a keyboard and mouse situation, which I had for many years with the Windows Media Center because it crashed all the time. It was terrible. Yeah, so if we can find a Jellyfin client that gets the 10-foot interface right, number one, that's a huge milestone.
[Alex]: Number two, can we find anything that beats, matches PlexAmp? Have any of you used PlexAmp? I know you have.
[Stephen]: I use it all the time. Yeah, I don't honestly, because I've looked into this quite a bit, I honestly don't think we're going to find something that matches it today.
[Stephen]: I have wanted to try Navidrome, right? Navidrome. I have wanted to try that, and what interests me is that it has a vast amount of Android clients.
[Stephen]: I don't know about the iOS clients for it, but I know on Android they have a lot of them, and so I carry both phones around anyway, so I could live with that, but right now I really do. If I'm out and about and I want to actually use my own music, it's PlexAmp.
[Alex]: Is Navidrome the one that forked from Subsonic?
[Geoff]: They didn't fork from Subsonic, but they are a Subsonic-compatible server, so you can use Subsonic clients with it. I use Navidrome. I think it's fantastic. You can tie in a whole bunch of stuff, and I think it's great. And then on the client side for Jellyfin, I'll just put a voice in for Wolphin.
[Geoff]: I'm not sure how to say it, but they just came out with their 1.0 release, and I've been using it now for a couple of months on my Android boxes, and it's... Pretty awesome.
[Alex]: Yeah, Wolphin's pretty cool. It's an amalgamation of walrus and dolphin or something, I believe.
[Alex]: It's an actual animal. It's very difficult to say, but anyway. So what we want is something that can do movies and TV shows perfectly fine on the TV.
[Alex]: We want something music-wise that can rival all the features, honestly, that we're expecting that we have become used to in Spotify. If it can do something like Spotify Connect where it can control remote speakers, That's huge. And Home Assistant have some really interesting stuff. Not Home Assistant. The Open Home Foundation have a new protocol or something coming
[Geoff]: around that soon.
[Geoff]: Sendspin.
[Geoff]: They've done something to replace, oh God, what was it? Snap? Snap server? I can't remember the name of it, but it escapes me though. But yes, they have done something to replace that so it can work on things like ESP boards and Sonos speakers and everything else out there.
[Alex]: Yeah, I want to address an elephant in the room, by the way. I know to you all, Jeff is here, but to us, Jeff is over there. So that's why we're all staring at Jeff when he's over there. Yeah, so we've got movies, TV shows, music. Another one for me, I don't know, are either of you big into audiobooks? No. I love audiobooks. What do you do for audiobooks now?
[Adam]: To take a quick step back to the music, to me that is not a linchpin in this discussion. music streaming apps are so ubiquitous and easy and included with every other service that you get, including your cellular service, et cetera, that I don't really mess with the music self-hosting anymore.
[Adam]: I have my original library that I've all converted over and such, but I don't collect new music in that way anymore. And that kind of ended for me at YouTube Music way back when, when that came out.
[Adam]: So I'm interested, I mean, it sounds like all of you self-host all your music still, and I'm interested in why when there's things like Tidal and Lossless from Apple and such.
[Stephen]: For me, it's one of the only types of media that I truly, really care about getting money to the artist, right? And so they're literally a band that is making money and maybe a living off of what they're doing.
[Stephen]: Whereas movies and whatnot, it's a huge production and whatnot with all these investors and everything else. And so while I don't think that we should just blatantly steal from them by any means, when I look at how artists are being paid on things like Spotify and whatnot, I just...
[Stephen]: I think it's kind of rude. It's so little that they're getting per stream that I even started paying attention to like all this title.
[Stephen]: Does title give more money? Which I think they do, but I haven't looked at it lately. But Spotify is not all that great for handing out funds, right? So I still will use Spotify to discover new music because that's a portion of self hosting music I haven't been able to touch I can't get like Spotify has like their AI DJ or what-have-you which whether it actually is AI I have no idea don't really care But Spotify is good at handing me like music If I find something I really like I go on Amazon or wherever I can and actually order the CD Rip it myself and put it on my server
[Alex]: There's a lot of joy in building a collection. This is something I've found already. So I've started to prep for Jellyfin June by... A couple of days ago, I went to a store in Mebane, North Carolina, just off I-40, which is basically a giant...
[Alex]: charity shop for old discs. And I bought Ella a copy of Frozen on Blu-ray. She has been picking this thing up and fondling it and looking at Elsa and looking at the artwork and Olaf and all that.
[Alex]: I also bought a copy of the British Office and stuff like that. Like, I'm going to rip these things. There's a mosquito in here.
[Stephen]: It's not a mosquito. It's up here in random Canada land and I'm sure other places. Up here, some people will call them like no-see-ums. They look kind of like a mosquito, but it literally does not bite you, doesn't take your blood, doesn't do anything, but quite annoying.
[Stephen]: Don't worry, it won't get to you.
[Alex]: We'll ignore it.
[Stephen]: It's okay.
[Stephen]: It's only Canada.
[Stephen]: So anyway,
[Alex]: there is a real joy in building a collection. And for me, I took two or three crates of CDs to give them away 15 years ago when we moved to London because the flat we're moving to was so small.
[Alex]: I didn't think we had the space for a bunch of DVDs and CDs and stuff. I literally gave them away. I really regret that because my wife has this thing where she reads a book every month and...
[Alex]: The books that really mean something to her end up on her keep shelf. And over her life, she's building, you know, maybe only two or three books a year end up on the keep shelf and the rest just goes to the book box or whatever.
[Alex]: I'm finding that with movies. I have a staging library in my Plex library where all the stuff that comes in that's kind of new, kind of just a rom-com or whatever, that goes into the staging library and I watch it.
[Alex]: And most of the time, Just delete it. But occasionally, something new will come along and you're like, that means something to me.
[Alex]: Or that was actually really just a beautiful piece of cinematography and I want to put that in the keep pile. And so for me, it's about building a relationship with the media, not just consuming it mindlessly.
[Adam]: It's interesting because I actually got a lot of satisfaction personally when I... did get rid of the media. Now, hosting it myself is still important. I don't want to be renting a lot of the things and there are
[Alex]: certain
[Adam]: albums and whatnot that I absolutely own. And the other thing is that you don't control when services get rid of tracks and
[Alex]: such.
[Adam]: But I actually felt like self-hosting in general has been a very freeing thing from a perspective of not being stuck with so many physical goods. Mm-hmm. And I really, really, that just works for my brain. Like it's less visual noise. It's less stuff to move when you move across the country like I did.
[Alex]: I'm not talking about a wall for this. I know. Maybe over a lifetime. Yeah.
[Adam]: You can, I had quite the collection. And, you know, DVDs also, I filled entire racks with DVDs and such.
[Adam]: And I just felt it was so nice to just get rid of this kind of weight of all this stuff, but still have all these treasured, you know, films albums etc at my fingertips and also everywhere because i could stream it i could bring it wherever i wanted to
[Alex]: go
[Adam]: so
[Alex]: i'm not saying necessarily that you have to buy the disc although supporting your artists and whatever someone in the comments of one of my videos said it's funny how you tiptoed around the topic of piracy as a creator as an individual person and yet Massive AI companies just ingested every piece of content, literature, copyrighted material they possibly could.
[Alex]: It's fine if you're a tech bro, but not if you're just a fat dude in North Carolina. Well, they might get sued,
[Stephen]: but it doesn't matter because they have
[Geoff]: so
[Stephen]: much money.
[Geoff]: Can I put my legal hat on for a second? Oh, legal hat. Yes, please go ahead. Legal hat. I'm actually doing that a lot this episode, so I'll put the legal hat on that one. They actually argue fair use because they are taking the work and transforming it into something else.
[Geoff]: so but
[Alex]: i'm going to take the work and transform it into my eyeballs
[Geoff]: yeah that doesn't quite work the same way alex i wish it did what if I remux it does that count I mean, transform as in literally turn into something. So they took a video and they turned it into code that the bot can then, you know, do things with.
[Alex]: Okay.
[Alex]: All right.
[Alex]: Well, I'm going to translate everything into anime Japanese. All right. And that will be offline. So has anybody got anything else on the Plex topic? I think we could probably talk about it for hours.
[Adam]: Well, I just wanted to, again, is the audio a requirement?
[Alex]: No, audio books for my wife are, but music is one of those things. It's a dragon that's hard to slay. I like the better quality you can sometimes get through local services. I like just feeling like it's coming from my house. And honestly, I mean, I don't know about you, but after I turned 30, I haven't found that much new music.
[Alex]: Discovery, there are services that will do Discovery for self-hosted apps these days, and I'll cover that throughout Jellyfin June. We'll mention some of them on here, of course. But yeah, it's going to be a fun time. I hope you'll come along on the journey with us for Jellyfin June. Should be fun.
[Stephen]: So gentlemen, have you been catching up on the news about Bitwarden?
[Alex]: I heard they got a new CEO.
[Stephen]: Yeah, for sure.
[Alex]: It
[Stephen]: could
[Alex]: only ever be a good thing, right?
[Stephen]: No, CEOs that come into things don't tend to want to make any sort of money for the company.
[Geoff]: No, especially not this CEO. So apparently in February, very quietly, the CEO of Bitwarden changed from a man named Michael Crandall, who moved to an advisory role, to Michael Sullivan.
[Geoff]: And Michael Sullivan, again, I didn't know this. This is all people have done all this homework. He was the former CEO of a company called Acquia and Insight Software. who on his LinkedIn, he very proudly highlights the fact that he is all facets of mergers and acquisitions with named private equity firms, including other companies that he has been involved with.
[Geoff]: So obviously the open source community, their antenna went up and we're like, is Bitwarden gonna be sold to private equity? What does that mean for Bitwarden? Because it seems like his skill is to prepare the company for a takeover of some kind.
[Alex]: So what's been happening lately? Is there something in the water? I don't know. Really, we didn't talk about the motivation for Plex's price increase at all, but I still have no idea what they're...
[Alex]: end game is
[Adam]: yeah i assumed like is this one last hurrah
[Alex]: maybe maybe they need the money maybe it's the same with Bitwarden because what one thing i did see in the news is that they removed the wording always free from their website didn't they
[Geoff]: they put it back they did take it away they're claiming their marketing department screwed something up oh yeah you mean they
[Alex]: got caught
[Geoff]: uh-huh
[Alex]: right
[Geoff]: Hand in cookie jar. They also changed their motto, which is grit for gratitude, responsibility, inclusion, and transparency.
[Geoff]: So now it's innovation and trust.
[Alex]: Right.
[Alex]: Sure.
[Alex]: I'm not feeling a lot of trust. If there's one type of company that must engender trust in its users, more than almost any other company...
[Alex]: It's either a medical institution or a
[Adam]: password.
[Adam]: Another word for that, your secrets.
[Stephen]: Yeah.
[Stephen]: Because they do store more than just passwords. Oh, absolutely.
[Adam]: I have all kinds of secrets in there.
[Stephen]: A hundred percent.
[Stephen]: And like you can send files through it. Actually, I use that quite frequently for sending just small text blips that I don't want sent on an open forum, like temporary passwords, stuff like that to send to someone.
[Stephen]: Yeah, like all sorts of things.
[Geoff]: You know, the irony of the whole thing is the guy who founded Bitwarden, Kyle Spearrin, I think is his name. He started Bitwarden because he got pissed off about LastPass and Hamachi and Log Me In screwing, you know, screwing up LastPass.
[Geoff]: So, yeah.
[Alex]: I mean, they've been good guys for a while now, haven't they? Ten bucks a year and they haven't put the price up.
[Geoff]: No.
[Alex]: Well, they just raised the price. But they did.
[Geoff]: They doubled the
[Alex]: price.
[Alex]: Quietly.
[Geoff]: Quietly as well.
[Alex]: With very short notice, too. Well, that's not cool. What did they raise it to? It was 10. What did they put it up to? 20. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, it's still not a lot of money, is it? But, you know, that's not the point. Are we going to have to move off Bitwarden? Are we going to have to find something else? Is that what this is turning into? Well, we can self-host it. Does that fix it? Because it only works if the clients still exist, right?
[Adam]: It's true.
[Stephen]: I haven't looked into it fully, but I'm pretty sure that you just use the normal client.
[Geoff]: You do.
[Geoff]: So I self-host, it's called Vaultwarden. It used to be Bitwarden RS. I self-host it. It's very easy to spin up. As far as I'm aware, the guy who, I think it's Dani Garcia, is the one who created it in the first place.
[Geoff]: He actually works for Bitwarden, and from things that have been posted around the internet, there doesn't seem to be any desire to kill Vaultwarden. They're very openly supporting it. But again, if they get sold to a private equity company, we've all seen what private equity companies will do.
[Geoff]: So I'm not so sure.
[Stephen]: But also consider that if you undertake self hosting this, that if that database goes poof, or you don't have infrastructure that maybe is super resilient and backed up, all of your passwords are gone.
[Alex]: What's the worst that could happen?
[Stephen]: What's the worst that could? Yeah, sure.
[Adam]: I can't even imagine these days, honestly.
[Stephen]: No, I'd be done. I'm
[Adam]: so reliant on it, it's ridiculous.
[Stephen]: 100%.
[Stephen]: Yeah.
[Stephen]: Well, not only just for passwords, right? But all of the rolling codes, everything, right? I have that all in there because I don't want five different apps. I don't want the Google authentication thing.
[Alex]: Apart from Microsoft Authenticator for certain things.
[Stephen]: I started working a way of getting around that. Was that a Microsoft sound? I had a Microsoft voice. That was an Outlook sound. That was perfect timing. Perfect timing. Was that you, Jeff?
[Geoff]: No, that
[Stephen]: wasn't me.
[Stephen]: No, he was on Linux. It must have been me. He's just pleased. But I put the Mac on do not disturb mode, so that's interesting, isn't it?
[Stephen]: Maybe a phone.
[Stephen]: I could change that, but I doubt we'll get emails again.
[Alex]: Don't we just love Microsoft?
[Stephen]: Oh, I love it. It's so good.
[Adam]: Here's a question, though. What's the worst that could happen?
[Stephen]: In what situation?
[Stephen]: With Bitwarden.
[Adam]: Okay, we say it gets unshittified, right? It's not worse than the other offerings out there. At that point, it's just
[Stephen]: equally
[Adam]: shitty.
[Alex]: What are the ways they could unshittify is the question,
[Adam]: I guess.
[Alex]: Could they put ads in between every unlock that you do unless you pay a certain amount? I guess they could. Could they limit the number of passwords you store arbitrarily? I guess they could.
[Adam]: They could do that one. They could limit how many
[Alex]: you store.
[Stephen]: They could.
[Stephen]: How many rolling codes per account you get unless you pay more.
[Alex]: How many unlocks per hour. There's a lot of ways that you could get in the way of that
[Geoff]: flow.
[Geoff]: I mean, think of this way. How did LastPass enshittify? I mean, there's your playbook. I mean, they, they raised their price. I'm trying to remember. They raised their price. I remember that one. And then I don't remember what else I got off. You guys talk. I'm going to
[Adam]: do some homework.
[Adam]: Yeah.
[Adam]: That's why I left. It was because they got hacked.
[Alex]: Oh, they got hacked like twice too. Didn't they? Oh, Which was funny, one of those hacks I found out... There's that Microsoft noise again. One of the hacks I found was because one of the LastPass employees had Plex on their computer.
[Adam]: Oh, no way.
[Alex]: And there was a vulnerable version of Plex on his computer, yeah. It's just funny how this episode is cyclical.
[Adam]: Yeah.
[Alex]: So let's not wait for Bitwarden to unshittify. Let's crowdsource some ideas. If you know, you can write into us at contact at bitflip.show. Give us your ideas. You can come find us on Mastodon, Jeff. Yep.
[Geoff]: Yep.
[Geoff]: Bitflip show on Mastodon. You also can support us on Patreon if you want. Thank you to everyone who supported us so far on Patreon. You can find more information at bitflip.show slash support.
[Alex]: Indeed you can.
[Alex]: We're up to a grand total of almost 10 patrons now, I believe, which is honestly, we're just doing this for the fun of it. We really appreciate all of you. And none of us, we put the Patreon up there because, well, it would be nice to pay for the editor.
[Alex]: Not out of our own pockets necessarily. So thank you to each and every one of you who's subscribed.
[Adam]: It's honestly amazing.
[Adam]: The fact that we're being supported by people already to help do this thing that is fun for us, but it does cost us money to do this.
[Stephen]: This guy has a lot of YouTube followers, but for I think for you and I, we're like, wait, people are actually sending us money to do this talking thing. No, like that's, I know it's probably old hat maybe for Alex at this point, although I'm sure.
[Stephen]: Thanks
[Adam]: mom.
[Adam]: If that, if one
[Stephen]: of them is you, thanks
[Adam]: mom.
[Stephen]: I'm sure you still absolutely are very appreciative of all the people that watch your content, but like you have many people watching your content and you've been doing it for far longer than we have.
[Alex]: Okay, but fill a room with those 10 people, with 100 people or the several hundred people that we're probably talking to right now. I'd get a bit nervous still about you, even after all this time.
[Adam]: Yeah, no
[Alex]: doubt.
[Alex]: But the fact just talking to a camera and it's just, I'm hanging out with three or four of my mates, you know, it's a real privilege. It's fantastic.
[Geoff]: Thank you to everybody that
[Alex]: helped make this possible. So I wasn't here last time. It was my wife had booked me a birthday trip and I thought the three of you did an outstanding job. But one person in particular... got their soapbox out and by golly did he use it we're of course talking about jeff and well in fact i have the perfect prop right here Bambu Lab steven and i both are you know customers over the years and what i find really interesting about the Bambu Lab controversy is it immediately i was driving home and i was driving past the micro center i went in to have a look
[Alex]: I was going to buy an X2D on the way home as a birthday treat to myself. I didn't. I looked at the U1. I know you've got one of those. And I looked at it and I was like, I need to do some more research. And everything I'm seeing about the U1 looks amazing. But what I find really interesting about that is how this is like proper Streisand effecting for Bambu Lab.
[Alex]: You know, Lewis Rossman, Gamers Nexus, a bunch of other people have started going on and on and on about Bambu. And ultimately, I know Bambu aren't watching this, but you've already lost a sale because you're being assholes.
[Alex]: Stop it.
[Alex]: Now, Jeff, I know that you want to put your lawyer hat
[Geoff]: on.
[Geoff]: I do, because the past two weeks have been interesting for me kind of sitting here with my lawyer hat. So for those who didn't see it, The Verge did a pretty in-depth article on the whole...
[Geoff]: controversy um and so they kind of outlined a lot of the history and a lot of the stuff that went on there'll be a link in the show notes about it but the kind of short version what happened this is your stuff
[Alex]: this is your lawyer hat by the way jeff
[Geoff]: Perfect.
[Geoff]: And it actually, the Bambu logo is just above. Well done. Excellent. Well done. So as you were software, the software freedom conservancy has stepped in and they started taking some action.
[Geoff]: So basically they forked Bambu Studio's code base. They took the guy, the developer's code and that he, you know, that off this whole thing, and they are going to try and reverse engineer the plugin library that Bambu uses to connect to their cloud stuff.
[Geoff]: Um,
[Geoff]: Also, interestingly, the developer himself posted a, I think it was 30 points about how Bambu has violated the AGPL. So that kind of got me interested of, okay, well, this is their perspective about how they violated the AGPL.
[Geoff]: And we'll talk more about that in a minute. But then the Verge article had a good job of Bambu's perspective about how they were not violating the AGPL.
[Geoff]: So I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about this because I know on the internet, Everyone is big on to open source, good company, bad company. All those, you know, is violating open source. And to be clear, I do not like what Bambu has done. See last episode where I went on my soapbox. But they may have an ever so slight case on some of these things. I kind of want people to understand not everything in the law is black and white, you know, clear lines.
[Geoff]: So
[Geoff]: The main issues around this are, so the AGPL code says that any fork of it has to remain open source itself, in essence. I'm paraphrasing a little bit. And so the question becomes whether or not the plugin that they're using is a corresponding source under the AGPL.
[Geoff]: And basically, that includes any kind of shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms. The library that Bambu created that allows Bambu Studio to connect into their printer stuff, that is, I think, pretty justifiably a corresponding source.
[Geoff]: The question is whether or not it dynamically loads itself. And again, Bambu, I bet you Dollars to Donuts has some very good lawyers, and I'm sure they reviewed all this very carefully, and they signed off on it.
[Geoff]: But I gotta say, when you load up Bambu Studio the first time, it's kind of one of those, do you want to install the networking plugin? Yes. You don't have to do anything else to install it, it's just there. No configuring, no nothing.
[Alex]: Doesn't it remind you a little bit of Windows 95, Windows 98, XP, and Internet Explorer? Yeah. You kind of just, when you're at that first initial phase of installing an OS or installing a printer and it says, do you want to install the network plugin?
[Alex]: You're like, well, yeah, I want to connect to my printer over the network. Of course I do. Do you want to go on the internet? Yeah, I need Internet Explorer. At least with IE, there was no choice. It was just the default. Yeah. suppose the one saving grace here is that they do have that flow that asks you when you first download Bambu Slicer do you want to install the network plugin but it's i mean maybe it's one of those areas of the law you probably got more experience than i do where it's it's technically accurate to do that but it's absolutely not the spirit of it
[Alex]: And I'm really curious as to where historically the AGPL has been enforced, where the spirit hasn't been followed, but the absolute letter has
[Geoff]: been.
[Geoff]: So here's the interesting thing. The AGPL, as far as I could tell, has really not been taken to court. There's not a whole lot of case law and stuff on it. So this is sort of uncharted, which goes back to my point of,
[Geoff]: This is not a cut-and-dry thing. It's going to be ultimately up for someone's going to have to sue Bambu or Bambu's going to have to sue the developer or Gamers Nexus or someone else who's put up this code.
[Alex]: You know what's amazing to me is that it's not Oracle suing Canonical for shipping ZFS first or something like that. We haven't seen, as you're right, we haven't seen a proper license... battle in the courts and to some degree it kind of makes the whole free software movement just a bunch of keyboard warriors until it has some proper case law so the teeth behind it yeah yeah and whether it goes for or against okay i guess we'll i guess we'll find out and i'm excited that we will but until that happens it's just there's no other precedence
[Adam]: for
[Alex]: that
[Adam]: there's no
[Geoff]: Not.
[Geoff]: I don't think so. Not really. I mean, so actually, interestingly, I saw that this is the first I'd heard about it. The software group, they're actually suing Vizio over.
[Geoff]: Oh, because basically Vizio on their TVs has. Yeah, Vizio has. They use Linux, I believe, on their TVs, and they don't open source all the code for their TVs.
[Geoff]: And so they're suing Vizio over that. That one's actually going to trial in August, and I'm actually going to pay attention to that one because I think that's actually now that I know about it. Very interesting.
[Alex]: I wonder how many devices run Linux in the world that don't provide their source. A
[Geoff]: lot of them.
[Geoff]: Yeah.
[Geoff]: A lot of them. And because, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, everyone thinks, oh, well, they have to give over their DRM keys.
[Geoff]: No, you wouldn't have to give over your DRM keys. Like going back to Bambu, they wouldn't have to, you know, they can still have their cloud and still sandbox their cloud and still prevent you from, you know, using the, you know, if they don't want you to be able to upload through the cloud,
[Geoff]: there are means for them to stop you from doing it. And it's not a user string. Not a user agent
[Alex]: string.
[Alex]: I'm absolutely with you. It's not a user string. That was such BS when you laid that out last episode. That's not security. That's just... No.
[Adam]: Pretending?
[Adam]: Go ahead.
[Alex]: Yeah.
[Adam]: I mean, I
[Alex]: remember hacking websites by changing the user string from Chrome to Firefox or something back in the day. That's
[Adam]: not
[Alex]: security.
[Alex]: Not even remotely.
[Alex]: You've got to have public key infrastructure if you want security. Simple as that.
[Geoff]: Yeah.
[Geoff]: And the other arguments that Bambu is making, they're threatening terms of service. And the question will be, well, does the terms of service of a product trump a license?
[Geoff]: And that would be an interesting question.
[Alex]: I'll tell you what does trump terms of service. My purchasing decisions, my dollars, my money. I do not support this shenanigans. And I don't want to
[Geoff]: either.
[Geoff]: For those watching, there is a Snapmaker U1 in my background.
[Alex]: It's
[Adam]: pretty awesome.
[Alex]: You know, I spent a long time in Micro Center, probably half an hour just in front of the U1, playing around with it, watching the tool heads. I'm sure you'll tell us, Jeff, in a future episode, but it's pretty cool watching a tool head change the entire thing.
[Alex]: And I was watching, I think it was a CNC or a Thomas Sandalera video about it, CNC Kitchen video. And they were talking about the time savings, even with something like the H2C that doesn't poop as much as the X1C behind me.
[Alex]: The time savings, like they had an 11 hour print that with the U1 took like two. Yeah.
[Geoff]: So the test print for the U1 is a little, you know, red dragon. Again, it's got a lot of changes. It took two and a half hours in the U1. I threw it into Bambu Slicer to see what it would take, you know, for my P1S. 14 and a half hours with 400 filament changes.
[Alex]: Yeah.
[Alex]: Wow.
[Alex]: Stupid little, like, two-inch dragon. I must admit, I didn't expect when I bought the H2C that I have in January to be sat here in only May going, I'm probably never going to buy another Bambu product.
[Alex]: Because I love the H2C as a thing. It just works first time every time. It does seven colors. It's everything I could have ever wanted from a printer.
[Alex]: except the company behind it. And this was coming from a diehard Prusa fanboy. Prusa still exists. Snapmaker exists. I don't know much about them as a company. So we'll have to look into that. But, You know, it just opens the 3D printer market wide open again, where it was headed down the Apple route of having one major player.
[Alex]: And I know there are people watching and people listening because they've told me that don't care, that have bought Bambu printers since the news. That's cool. That's fine. I care, though. And I'm not going to spend it. And that's ultimately the only language these companies will understand.
[Adam]: Yep, vote with your wallet. Please write us if you all want to see this review of the new printer because I have been bothering him and it's not worked.
[Adam]: So please.
[Geoff]: I will give some back. My wife has been monopolizing it for the past like week because she's been doing something for a friend and printing all these plates.
[Geoff]: And so I haven't gotten a whole lot of printing time on it.
[Adam]: She's not here to defend herself, but okay, we'll accept that at face value.
[Alex]: Now, I don't know about you guys, but doing this in person is just way better than doing it over a call. It's not often that we're gonna be able to come up to Canada or go up to where everybody is, but there are some conferences and things coming up where it might be nice to kind of coalesce in meet space.
[Alex]: I'm gonna be at Southeast LinuxFest, which is coming up real soon at some point in June. I don't have my phone to tell you the dates, but Southeast LinuxFest in Charlotte,
[Alex]: uh also uh what's the other one HomeLab Fest Jeff Geerling just announced HomeLab Fest for next year
[Adam]: correct st louis missouri
[Alex]: i think we're all going to go to that and and have a good time
[Adam]: Is there any other events or anything else that you guys are going to? Those are the ones that I can think of, at least in the short term. All right.
[Alex]: We'll think on something.
[Geoff]: Southeast LinuxFest is June 12th through the 14th. There
[Adam]: you go.
[Adam]: Thank you.
[Geoff]: Yeah.
[Geoff]: Wow.
[Geoff]: That's real soon.
[Adam]: Okay.
[Adam]: I won't be there. That's too soon. Yeah. It's where we met. It's
[Alex]: true.
[Alex]: So if there is an event, however, that you think one of us should be at, if it's a Canadian event, we have a representative. The trouble is getting across the border is expensive. Like if we can find like a Breeze Airways flight for me to Orlando is like 60 bucks.
[Alex]: Like I'll do that all day. Yeah. So if there's an event, let us know and we'll do our best to come and support you and see what's going on.
[Alex]: Do we have anything else to talk about today?
[Geoff]: No, I think that's about it. So again, reach out, contact at bitflip.show. You can get us on social media, Mastodon, Patreon. We would love your support. I think that's it. So thank you all for listening. This was episode seven and we'll talk to you next time. Bye. Bye.