[WastingMyTime89]

It's a community project started after Emby became closed source. They have multiple contributors who don't assign copyright. They legally can't become closed source even if someone wanted to. No one owns the whole code.

[input_sh]

> They have multiple contributors who don't assign copyright.

But that doesn't guarantee they wouldn't if Jellyfin approached them like "here's $X for writing this code". Or try hiring them from the start and asking them to sign a contract that transfers their copyright over to the company. Or maybe the contributors would tell them no, make a media fuss about it, and then Jellyfin's team could track down their commits and just re-write them.

Of course, I'm not saying that this will happen, nor I am saying that the Jellyfin's team will even make an attempt at going down this road, but the fact that it's open sourced at the moment is not a guarantee that it wouldn't be in the future.

Emby had a fair amount of contributors as well (https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/graphs/contributors) and then they've just stopped pushing more commits to it. As far as I'm aware, none of those people sued them.

[bluGill]

It only takes one to refuse though.

Sure you can find and rewrite that person's contributions, but that person can also fork again.

[Aeolun]

Who’s going to sue someone taking it closed source?

[addingnumbers]

How much does that matter to us?

Who's going to sue the rest of the developers who keep working on the open version we'd rather use?