Immich is joining FUTO!
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Will the license change?
No. Immich will continue to be licensed under AGPL without a CLA.
I hate that it needs to be said but love that they said it so plainly
Isn’t a huge part of the point of copy left licences that an author can’t change the license without rewriting the code entirely?
For the license to be changed every team member needs to submit a written agreement that he agrees to the change, otherwise their contributions must be removed as they were written under a different license, the only exception is usually permissive licenses such as MIT/BSD 3 clause.
Usually, to rugpull FOSS contributors, companies who maintain FOSS software ask contributors to sign a CLA which waives their rights and lets the control their contributions. Immich isn’t doing any of that, and it will likely remain AGPL forever because changing the license will be a big hassle for them with the amount of contributors.
What’s a CLA?
Contribution/contributor license agreement. It’s a document that transfers the copyright from the original author - developer submitting a patch or PR - to the project owner, e.g. FUTO. If FUTO required CLA for all Immich contributions, then FUTO would own the copyright for all the source code of Immich. This allows FUTO to relicense Immich under a different license, other than GPL, for whatever purpose, without asking anyone. For example they could make modified Immich versions for sale, or sell the Immich source code to third parties under EULA or any other license. Without a CLA, FUTO would have to get written agreement from every Immich source code contributor to change the Immich license, which would happen in 2000 and never, at least not without ponying up cash.
I’m happy for them. Immich, along with Nextcloud, was the driving force behind my getting in to self hosting - getting away from the ridiculous and increasing subscription prices associated with keeping family photos and documents.
It has come an incredibly long way in the time I’ve been using it. I’ve kicked them a donation or two, a first for me with OSS, because it continued to provide so much value for me.
I had read earlier that Alex was hoping to transition to working on this full time and I am happy he has been able to see that realized in - what appears to be - a positive manner.
Loved immich. But the fact I can’t filter on specific folders / collections that are uploaded from my phone makes it unusable for me. I don’t want one timeline full with meme images.
This only works when manually uploading using the CLI with a flag, but that breaks the whole point of the app. So I went back to Google photos
I am not sure I understand the issue, are you or are you not wanting to backup those memes? Because in the immich app you can select the folder to backup from, e.g. camera, and in the timeline on my phone in the immich app I only see my camera timeline plus backed up images, but not other folders on my phone.
If you mean they all get backed up from different folders into the same timeline, then yes, that’s a bit stupid. I have a situation like that and what I did was to make a separate account on my immich server just for art I find online I am collecting. Then I don’t upload through the app, although with switching account you maybe could, but instead move those images into that accounts external library. Then share the whole library of that account with my actual account. Then it appears in the shared tab. But I understand that might get too cumbersome.
Exactly the second situation. And I’m not doing all that. To ‘fix’ I just periodically upload using the cli to different collections or whatever they’re called. But probably not going to continue using it ngl.
Immich was my first donation too. It’s grown so much, implemented features from user suggestions, and is quite polished.
It started as a Picasa/google photos copy, but is so much more now.
Can’t wait to see where they are headed.
Whoah, isn’t FUTO the non-profit that Louis Rossmann works for? This is great news!!
That’s awesome. Immich is one of the most professional self hosted solutions I’ve used, so I love to see this.
Funded by a (somewhat controversial) tech billionair, see a recent interview with him here: https://youtu.be/5UHF84gyVWg
I know nothing about this person, but on multiple occasions I’ve had the thought that if I was a gazillionaire, I’d sponsor a bunch of open source. Maybe this is that? I’ll choose to stay hopeful (though I’m kinda dumb about this sorta stuff)
Don’t Abuse the People We expect FUTO companies to have an honest relationship with their customers. Ideally revenue comes from customers paying directly for the services provided by company.
https://futo.org/what-does-futo-believe/
Good for the Immich guys, but I fear incoming enshittification or a subscription model.
Your quoted paragraph is the only sane alternative to the ad supported internet. Think Fastmail vs gmail - both are run for a profit, but fastmail’s business model is to simply sell subscriptions. Their incentives are better aligned with the consumer, and while nobody’s going to become a billionaire off the company I have to imagine that they have a very reliable customer base.
Good software should be paid for, devs gotta eat
