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Cake day: March 10th, 2024

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  • Large data centers can consume over 100 MW of power. Almost ALL the energy a computer consumes is turned into heat, like well over 90%. A home AC unit pulls a little under 1 kW, and I think heating is about the same so that’s equivalent to heating over 100,000 homes, except those homes will eventually get warm and stop running the heat. The data center churns all day, every day. Given that, it may be equivalent to all the heat put out in more like 250,000 homes. Data centers produce an ABSURD amount of heat.

    Edit: and keep in mind, that’s HOMES, not people. Average people per household in the US is 2.5, so that’s heating for over 600,000 people.


  • True, but unless that new group is willing to step up and invest in physical device production to directly compete, I don’t think it’s going to be the same. The type of people buying a dedicated NAS with a custom OS are looking for as close to a plug and play solution ad they can get. They’re less inclined to reinstall the OS on their new NAS, and the market is probably going to favor the now proprietary version TrueNAS sells, especially if they take steps to make it difficult to replace the OS on their devices.


  • Yeah, no, they couldn’t do it to the kernel. But that’s not really the interesting part of their product. It’s all the software that they as a company hold the copyright to. If they solely hold copyright on all their own code or if they have permission to relicense from their contributors, they can take any or all of their products closed source, and when I say “their products” I specifically mean the things they as a company produce, which they built on top of open source projects that they don’t control.


  • This probably doesn’t apply to TrueNAS, but technically, it’s possible to close a GPL project. You’d need the permission of every last contributor to relicense their code, or they’d have to rewrite all the code they can’t get relicensed (e.g., someone said no or already died), or they could do it if they never accepted any pull requests because they would then be the sole copyright holder and have the freedom to relicense at their whim.

    I can’t vouch for TrueNAS, but most open source projects accept pull requests because free labor, whether they’re corporate projects or not, so I’d assume they can’t freely relicense without a hell of a headache, so yeah, it’s probably staying open for the foreseeable future.




  • That’s a big part of what PeerTube tries to address. Yes, the videos still must be hosted somewhere, but PeerTube streams the video as a torrent where the host is the tracker and guaranteed seed while every client streaming the video is a torrent client that shares what it already has with every other active stream to reduce demand on the host. It’s not a perfect solution since the host must act as a guaranteed seeder, but for popular videos actively being streamed by many people at once, it has the potential to massively reduce traffic for those streams.

    For less popular videos that may not have more than one viewer in any given moment, though, there’s likely no real impact. If it got some more development interest, I could see it getting archival clients that behave sort of like an *Arr server for media management, allowing users to save their favorite videos in exchange for acting as an extra seed over some longer term. That’d help, but it’s definitely not a full solution.