Apparently in the past day, they’ve removed all the logos from the Microgrants projects and clarified that the grants are unsolicited
Apparently in the past day, they’ve removed all the logos from the Microgrants projects and clarified that the grants are unsolicited
Such a bummer that they took over Immich
Why? Idk about you, but I like it when FOSS projects I like get a bunch of funding, especially since they retained their same license.
What exactly is the issue? Do you not like Linux either because they’re largely funded and developed by Google, Intel, etc?
Immich is fine… full FOSS and alive. I just dont get you people.
What keeps them from changing the Immich license from AGPL to FUTO?
Copyright.
AGPL says that the original author of any chunk of code owns the copyright to it.
Meaning to change the license you have to get every copyright holder (read every developer who has contributed code) to agree to the license change and give over the copy right.
Edit: to be clear, I don’t like FUTO either. As a visible minority, I know libertarians are not my friends. But a copyright rug pull is hard to do in immich.
I keep seeing this and don’t understand it. Do people lump all the right wing crazies in with libertarians or something?
I get that libertarianism is a big tent, but it’s not a tent that covers intolerance. The foundation of libertarianism is simple:
If someone thinks it’s okay to hurt or disparage someone based on their skin color or country of origin, that’s a violation of the NAP and definitionally they’re not libertarian. A lot of people hide behind the libertarian label because they’ve been thoroughly rejected by the major parties, but that doesn’t make them libertarian.
Libertarians disagree on a lot of things, like the role of government, whether property rights exist, and what is “aggression,” but they are very consistent in rejecting hate. Libertarians were supporting LGBT folks before it was cool, and the 2024 candidate for the Libertarian Party was a gay man in complete defiance of the candidate chosen by the Mises caucus, the far right caucus that took over the party. Libertarians are about as extreme left as you’ll get on social issues, and about as extreme right as you’ll get on fiscal issues, generally speaking.
I guess I genuinely don’t understand what people see as libertarian. I consider myself libertarian, but I take my roots from Penn Jillette, and add in stuff like UBI. Here’s a great snippet from him, and my (poor) summary:
I think a social safety net crosses that threshold. I would use violence to feed my family, and I would defend someone else who does so as well, so I think it’s fair for force everyone to pay into a social safety net that ensures everyone has enough to survive using the excess of others.
My SO is a visible minority as well, and they have no issues being with me. So I guess I’m missing something about the public perception of libertarianism.
From what I’m seeing, you’re right. If there was a contributor assignment policy (some official policy associated with Immich saying that by submitting a PR, you agree to assign copyright on your code changes go the Immich project), FUTO could change the license on future versions as they wished. But it doesn’t look like there’s any contributor assignment or contributor license agreement on Immich.
To be pedantic, Immich did change from MIT to AGPLv3 a while ago. FUTO could technically scrap the current version, grab the last MIT version of the code, relicense it under their “source-first” license (or any other license they like, pretty much), and declare “this is now the official development version of Immich from which new releases will come.” That would be drastic even for FUTO, though (I don’t think that’s likely any time soon), and the community could then fork the latest AGPLv3 version with a different name and carry on with development.
If they pulled that off, a community spinoff from that same version would become the new immich killer. Not the first time it’s happened, and the current maintainers aren’t the only ones capable of maintaining it.
Once you go copy left, you need everyone’s consent to change the license.
The MIT license is the creator owns the copyright, and any changes you contribute are licesned under the sam MIT as the project.
So to go from MIt -> anything only requires the consent of the project onwer.
Any copy left (like AGPL) license -> anything requires every contributors consent.
It is possible, but practically infeasible at scale.
I’d have to read more about AGPL, but IIRC GPLv2 says you must license any derived code as the same license.
IANAL, just someone whose looked into this before.
True, unless the license is “GPLv2 or later”. Then anyone can upgrade it to GPLv3.
As far as I’m aware, contributor license agreements can include a clause stating that you agree to hand over copyright on submission of code. If every contributor has signed the CLA, there is only only one copyright holder, making relicensing easy.
However, successfully using this to relicense to something less open is extremely rare, and this isn’t a concern anyway as they don’t have a CLA.
Yes, however those aren’t “copy left” licenses like AGPL whose defining feature is the owner not holding copyright
Nothing about copyleft causes the “owner” to not hold the copyright on a work.
Copyright gives the holder (either the author or the party to which the copyright is assigned) a few specific (but broad) exclusive rights to the work: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution, public performance (which probably doesn’t so much apply to software), and public display (also not applicable to software, so much). (And then there’s circumvention, but that’s yucky and irrelevant to this case, so we’ll ignore it.)
“Exclusive” means nobody is allowed to do any of those things except the copyright holder (unless the copyright holder licenses those rights to others, but we’ll get to that.)
The copyright holder can give/sell/transfer the copyright to someone else (in which case the previous holder is now excluded from doing with the work all the things in the first paragraph above because someone else now holds all those exclusive rights), but that’s not what the AGPL does.
The copyright holder can also license any or all of the exclusive rights in the first paragraph to some person or party (or in the case of an “open license” like the AGPL, to everyone).
The AGPL licenses rights like distribution and preparation of derivative works to others (under certain conditions(/covenants) like “you can only distribute copies if you do so under the same license as you got it under”).
So, if some hypothetical party named “Bob” started a project, they’d hold the copyright. If Bob put the AGPL on that project and also required any contributor to assign copyright on their specific contributions to Bob, Bob would hold the copyright on the entire project code, including all contributions. Someone else could take advantage of the terms of the AGPL allowing derivative works and redistribution to create their own fork (so long as they abided by the conditions(/covenants) in the AGPL), and if they did so, they could omit on their fork any copyright assignment requirement, in which case the fork could end up owned by a mishmash of different copyright holders (making it hard to impossible for the administrator of the fork to do anything tricky like changing what license future versions were under.)
However, on Bob’s original (non-fork) version, if Bob, as the copyright holder, changes the license file to something proprietary, Bob has (arguably?) created a new work that is not the same work as the previous version, and Bob can license that new version under a different license. (I suppose one might be able to argue that changing just the license file isn’t legally enough to make a new version, but the very next time a nontrivial change was made to the codebase, that would qualify as a new version, so it kindof doesn’t matter.) Bob has already licensed previous versions of his non-fork under the AGPL, so Bob can’t really rescind that license already granted on older versions. But new versions could indeed be put under a different license. (Mind you, there are licenses that have specific terms that make them rescindable on old versions. Take for instance the Open Gaming License fiasco that WotC tried to pull not terribly long ago. But I don’t think the AGPL is a license that can be rescinded.)
Since Bob can’t rescind the license on older versions, if Bob made a future version proprietary, the community or any particular party that wanted to could take the last AGPL version of the non-fork and make a fork from there that remained under the AGPL.
The moral of the story is: if you don’t want the copylefted code project you start to be changed to a proprietary license later, don’t do any copyright assignment agreement. The codebase being owned by a diverse mishmash of different copyright holders is a feature, not a bug.
And, as mentioned elsewhere in this post, Immich is owned by a lot of different copyright holders as it has no copyright assignment requirement.
What did they do to immich?!
Funded a team of devs to work on it full time.
Also made it shareware.
Pls explain. I cannot see how it is shareware with an AGPL licence behind it and full code published. Or is it just fud ?
fud, it’s “shareware” in the sense that there’s a dismissable popup that asks you to pretty please pay 100$, but it’s AGPLv3 and no features are locked behind the paywall.
Huh. So anyone could maintain a fork or patchset and distribute builds that were feature-for-feature identical to Immich but with no nag screens. Just an interesting thought.
I don’t know about Immich, but in other FUTO projects you click the “I’ve paid” botton and it’s disabled, even if you didn’t pay. FUTO licensed code says you can’t remove the pay button in derivative works, but Immich is AGPL so that doesn’t apply.
You can already do this with their custom css. I did it for about 5 minutes and then realized paying $99 was the right thing to do. It’s a reasonable ask on their part.
So we need to make a patch then. Not great but fine.
Sorry, that’s what I grew up calling paid software that was free to use in practice. That effectively how Immich is presented now. There is a button to buy a license which changes to an (optional) supporter badge once purchased.
For the record, I am very happy with the software and paid for a license. I can see why people are bothered with Futo’s language but I personally can’t complain with how they’ve handled the project itself.
I love FUTO’s “license” policy. Basically, the license only shows you’ve paid, and in many cases, you can click the botton without paying and get the same badge. They’re basically encouraging donations through guilt.
People should donate to projects they use, and I think FUTO’s nudge is a good idea that more projects should adopt.
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So immch is dead before it even matured enough to be reliable? Sad.
Still struggling to understand what makes it “dead.”