Open-sourcing server.js

[discapes]

Hi, will the streaming server be open sourced, or is it already? It would be very valuable to the community, and allow people to contribute in more ways.

[aicynide]

Its a shame stremio CEO don't reply to these kinds of issues

[jaruba]

Although I'm not the CEO, as the dev lead I don't believe that the community can assist on server development, the code is very intricate as the main parts of it handle torrent streaming, a/v conversion and subtitle encoding conversion.

This is logic that was built many years ago and perfected through time, there are few people even from our team that are allowed to make changes to the server due to the high complexity of the code and high risk factor of breaking something without fully understanding the inner workings of it.

I also don't see how it can be very valuable to the community as it is already released separately as "Stremio Service" for all desktop platforms (+ Docker).

[discapes]

Okay, I definitely see your point about not taking contributions. However, it would still be very much appreciated if you could make the code public in a repository and license it under a free software license 🙏

[jaruba]

But can you justify why that is needed though? Is there any legitimate usecase that can come from open sourcing it?

If there are talented community developers that want to assist on server development for Stremio's betterment or goals, then they can apply for an internship, there is a link to the form for that on this page: https://www.stremio.com/community

They would go through an interview (as any intern requires many hours of mentoring and a core team member needs to be assigned to oversee their progress and results), and they get access to our codebase.

There are few closed source repositories in the Stremio org, and one of the main reasons for them being closed source is to discourage the creation of copy cat / fake apps.

We have seen hundreds of apps and websites that are full of aggressive ads (and some even try to trick users into doing one thing or another) claiming that they are Stremio. It is always hard and time consuming to attempt to stop such apps / websites / activities from continuing to function and it can even tarnish Stremio's name.

[SmartBoy84]

The thing is any such developers may want to look through the code, and potentially contribute, out of interest rather than for monetary purposes. Barring the code by keeping it "closed source" prevents such contributions and isn't really in the spirit of the otherwise OSS nature of the app.