Overall I think Alex handled this situation really well, listened to what people wanted and come to something that everyone's fine with.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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If I understand correctly, it's just a fancy donation?
Yeah, functionally it's the same. However I think it is a big perceptual change to be in line with the FUTO principle of "we want to make good software that is open and accessible, but we would also like you to pay us for it so we can continue this project sustainably." That's a bit of a contrast with the general open source approach of "I'm writing this software as a service to others, make a donation if you'd like to support my work."
Personally I think the move towards a more structured buy it if you can mindset is great. I've seen too many projects get abandoned because of lack of time and resources and then shift from developer to developer, sometimes getting better, sometimes worse.
Agree. But that’s how open pusrce is, for so many years. Until a magical model appears to keep the developers interested in giving time to it? But in the first place doing a foss project you need to understand what you are into. Monetize it after could be, if you want to live from it, but won’t be free anymore. Donation system worked pretty well for this . Don’t understand what is FUTO approach . Something similar to Proton I guess. So many people freaked out by privacy scandals, that made it a billion worth business. first with a massive amount of VPN services, some of them even from the same company and giving them different brands, browsers everywhere with same situation , then self hosting which it seems multiple developers are putting the eye on it as some fresh juice . And FUTO eyes specially
Privacy is a marketing angle right now for sure. I hate seeing companies like apple advertise to the vague privacy concerns of the general public. Companies like Proton are also making money based on privacy concerns.
As far as I've seen, FUTO's approach is to fund and support independent developers who have a high skill level and well thought out piece of software. They focus on software that is Open, or source available for auditing and viewing purposes, privacy respecting and free of any kind of advertising. They also are pushing for a new culture of payment to these developers that is not a donation to support, but a purchase to use. They don't insist on the purchase though, you can use any piece of FUTO sponsored software free of charge indefinitely.
So many people freaked out by privacy scandals, that made it a billion worth business. first with a massive amount of VPN services, some of them even from the same company and giving them different brands, browsers everywhere with same situation , then self hosting which it seems multiple developers are putting the eye on it as some fresh juice . And FUTO eyes specially
Can you elaborate this a bit more? Are the first few points about Proton, or in general? And I guess in the case of browsers you meant Chromium. Also I'm not really sure about what you meant regarding self hosting.
So basically WinRAR
Evidently there's some difference to the approach. I'm not familiar with the WinRAR days, but they specifically address that in this video. I don't know if it being similar to WinRAR is a good thing or bad thing in your book, but maybe you'll enjoy the video.
Except it's misleading as you aren't really buying it, you are buying a supporters badge key as I understand it. Might as well be selling an immich NFT. I still don't think this is being upfront and it's still a dark pattern it's just slightly less misleading than the blatantly false buy a license wording.
Why do you think you aren't really buying it? Is it because they allow you to run it without paying money for it?
I don't think the definition of "purchasing" software should be defined by whether you can run the service without paying or not. I think it's best defined as paying money for something that you like and want to exchange value for. In my book that's nothing near a dark pattern, as I can't imagine anyone being confused by it, let alone mistakenly believing there is missing features that they won't get until they buy.
Buying confers ownership of something even if it's just a legal agreement like a software license. No ownership over immich is being conferred, nothing is being conveyed to anyone so it's incorrect to term it a purchase, much less a purchase of immich.
Ownership is being conferred by purchasing immich, that's what the product key codes they've started using indicate.
That is the fundamemental change in the way they are offering Immich: if you pay, you are provided with proof of ownership (product key). If you don't, you are using it as a part of an indefinent trial period.
No, no ownership is being conferred except to a number, the supporters club key let's call it. That is what you are buying, it's like an NFT. And just like NFTs it's being marketed as though you are purchasing the work itself which you absolutely are not doing. You are paying for the right to say you paid.
If you don't pay you are in exactly the same state as if you paid regarding your license to use the software, it's licensed to you under the terms of the agplv3. If they were selling a support contract that would be fine too, but again, no, you get no extra support over what anyone posting a issue on the tracker will get. Even if it were a support contract then it should be made clear that is what you buy.
The technicality of usage rights is irrelevant, the developer is asking you to pay a set price that they've set as the total they would like to be reimbursed for providing the development service. That's not a contribution, that's a purchase. They're generous people though, so they won't restrict your use of the software if you choose not to pay.
Maybe you make donations to FOSS developers regularly. Unfortunately, I did not in the past. While I always intended to, it just slipped through the cracks. After running in to FUTO and the software they sponsor, I've been motivated to donate to or purchase much of the free software I'm using, and it's entirely because of the way they approach their relationship with the user.
If you feel like that's a dark pattern, or that your payment would only be purchasing an empty NFT, then I guess that's your choice. But purchasing FOSS applications provides an incredibly important line of support to developers who stem the tide of surveillance capitalism and the digital abuse that big tech has filled our world with. Call it a donation, contribution or purchase price. In any case you are exchanging value for something that has made your life better and supporting the person who made that possible.
Maybe it would help to view the cost of Immich as purchasing a ethics NFT. Sure, you have no observable difference in the material world, but you as a person have affirmed your ethical values through reciprocal action with someone who shares those values 😉
Technicality of usage rights is very relevant, framing as a purchase where it actually isn't is dishonest and the fact that they make more money being dishonest doesn't make it right. Other than that you used an awful lot of words to basically agree with me.
I've basically agreed with you this whole time, see my initial comment regarding the difference between the previous comtribution model and the new request for purchase:
Yeah, functionally it's the same.
However we're drawing different conclusions about the situation. You say it's misleading and morally wrong to refer to "buying" this software, I say it isn't and that it's actually a helpful perceptual change in fostering support from their users.
I don't really think there's anything else to say beyond that. If you don't like how Immich is handling their software, don't use it.
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/11186
- Will there be any paywalled features?
No, there will never be any paywalled features.
That's my understanding.
And I think a small fee to get out of the googlyclaws. Paying $100 once, to host immich for the family and supporting development is a no brainer to me.
But I understand not everyone has the resources or is willing to donate.
Sounds great to me. Us software devs need to eat, so I totally get trying to turn this into a profitable business model. I’m very happy that they’re not paywalling any features, but honestly, I’d be fine if they did. I’m probably going to pay either way. Immich has been awesome, and it’s gotten me off of my second to last Google app, Photos. If only there were a good alternative to YouTube…
Is immich in a usable state yet? I was looking for a self-hosted image service a while back, but eventually I just went with pigallery2 mostly due to the extremely simple file storage (just point to a folder and you're good to go), but I do miss being able to manage images/albums from the website and having a more mobile friendly version. I kind of avoided immich due to the repo saying it's under very active development (#scary).
Is immich in a usable state yet?
I've been using it for 388 days (as helpfully shown by the new buy button, nice touch), and it's been stable and rock solid the entire time.
I've had a few times it went offline, due to the breaking changes in the docker compose file because I auto-update everything, but it's always been like a 2 minute fix and it's back online.
Everything is backed up on my server nightly with incremental backups, both locally and online. So I'm not really worried about something going catastrophically wrong and deleting all my photos or something.
(just point to a folder and you’re good to go)
Immich has that in external library support, it's pretty easy to set up.
+1 to everything you just said - I've been using Immich for a little less (370 days, thanks to the same button). It's feature rich and rock solid.
Only thing I hope they add to the mobile app is the Years/Months/Days option, to make it easy to quickly group, then find, your photos. It's the one thing that keeps me using my phone's own Photos app (locally - no cloud sync).
Yeah that would be a nice feature to see. The mobile app is sometimes a little buggy loading photos on my phone too, it will be slow to load like it's pulling from the server even though the photos are also locally on the phone.
Works well, i havent had any bugs, you just have to be sure to read the release notes before updating, as there are breaking changes
I can't compare it to pigallery, but imo it really isn't fully usable. Lots of bugs for me. I'm still running it but waiting for it to be ready to replace Google photos. It has transcoding errors in the logs and file tracking issues (extra files). All of my recent motion photos are not detected. And I have read on GitHub that they are still working on fleshing out automated repair tasks.
I've been using it for the last year or so, no issues, as long as I confirm there are no breaking changes before updating my docker container. My only real problem is that I sorely, SORELY, miss the editing features I had in Google photos. There's been more than a couple of times now that I needed to quickly edit a photo as I would have done with Google photos, and when I couldn't, got aggravated enough to consider switching back. Still chugging along on immich, though. Still holding out hope that one day they'll add at least some basic editing features.
I use Nextcloud photos
Yes.
Wondering the same thing... I've been meaning to try it.
I'm using PhotoStructure at the moment. It's not as feature-rich, and the best features are only available on paid subscriptions, but it's a solid, reliable piece of software. That's what I want - a focused piece of software that favours stability over feature creep. Its deduplication is the best I've seen. The developer works on it full time, which is one of the reasons it has paid subscriptions (to make that sustainable).
Ente is pretty nice.
The wording is still misleading because you aren't purchasing immich and if you were, what exactly would you be purchasing? Control of the project? The immich name? You aren't purchasing a license to use it as you already have that. A supporters badge key? Okay well be upfront that that is what you are selling because you aren't selling immich itself.
You're keeping the project alive. You're purchasing the ability to continue using a project that will sustain and continue to get updates and add features.
I agree it is not clear, but it's also hard to say that in one or two words.
None of those things are true. Paying money is in no way guaranteeing the current developers will wake up wanting to maintain it tomorrow, nor am I purchasing access to an update service. It isn't a purchase of anything and shouldn't be framed as one. It's a Contribution or a donation that gives nothing in return and saying it's something else is dishonest.
Plus they already had donations set up before this.
So the donation system doesn’t work? Because there isn’t much difference. Just adding a fixed ammmount $
It frames it as a payment and not a donation, more people buy it when its like that
They switched away from the donations to implement this when they got acquired by FUTO
I don't really get what's the fuss about... We've all ran unlicensed trial software (like WinRAR) for years and nobody bat an eye.
I saw a lot of concern in the original github announcement regarding the use of the term "license." People felt it gave the team a legal footing to paywall features down the road and offer them only to licensed users, along with a few other concerns based in the legal implication of the term license. That of course runs counter to their statement that no features will be paywalled ever, so I guess there's still some anxiety over their trustworthiness out there. Understandable given some of the rug pulls that have happened in the open source world over the past year though (i.e Redhat, redis, etc...)
Fair enough, though FUTO already has an anti-rugpull licence AFAIK
They do, but I don't think that would apply to Immich. Immich is under the AGPL, and hasn't taken on any FUTO licensing. In a QA they did awhile back they said there was no plans to change it as well, so should be AGPL for the long term.
As far as I've seen, the only connection that Immich has with FUTO is the $1M grant and continued development support. I would imagine any sales from these Immich server purchases are now obligated to go to FUTO, but that's the only connection between the two companies.
No it doesn't
There "source first" license is very restrictive and only grants some rights to the users. It doesn't allow forking and continuing a project. (At least not in a way that isn't a legal problem)