THE previous part of this series was more of an exploratory overview of problems with YouTube, focusing on the latest escalation, which is a blunder for the relationship between Google and Free Software (Google's Summer of Underpaid Labour, or GSoC, is discredited by this).

Today, in this third part (with video to come soon as well), we begin to enumerate the issues with YouTube.

"Financial aspects aside, in the next part we'll explain the connection between the financial ambitions of YouTube and why Google is lawyering up against non-profit Free software projects and volunteers/activists."First of all, it's not even clear if YouTube is profitable. Sure, it has revenue, but lots of expenses on top of that (including paying some "creators", not just YouTube staff, hardware, bandwidth). We've done these calculations for years (in IRC mostly) and we always reach the conclusion that operational costs rise over time. We also know there's a financial woe for YouTube; its revenue is actually decreasing while costs of storage skyrocket because the catalogue is growing and newer uploads can be very large (HD) files.

Does this justify turning the site into a malicious "app" (with DRM, proprietary JavaScript, malicious ads etc.) or is it a sign that it's time to jog on and find another place for video hosting?

Financial aspects aside, in the next part we'll explain the connection between the financial ambitions of YouTube and why Google is lawyering up against non-profit Free software projects and volunteers/activists. ⬆