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
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
So immch is dead before it even matured enough to be reliable? Sad.
Still struggling to understand what makes it “dead.”
It’s a big disappointment because the facial recognition is great, meaning that they could be doing bad things behind the scene. They could have a backdoor so their buddies could check to see if you’re Hispanic or non-white. That’s just one thing. Could is not is. But its enough to make me stop and think of uninstalling.
It’s still open source, not sure where this is coming from
It’s coming from technical ignorance. There’s little wrong with FUTOs license, here are the limitations:
First the good:
Yes, good, I don’t want Google using my code to make billions.
And the not so good:
Bad. If I forked and majorly modified the code by significant contribution, I don’t see why my release should have a “donate” link to the original producer and not for my efforts the donor is actually using. This is the same problem the first limitation seeks to address, but from a different angle; namely: monetizing “intellectual property” instead of work.
Copyleft is cool because it means freedom, but everyone in here fighting because code first prevents them from potentially monetizing the projects they like is completely missing the point of copyleft.
If you ask them to articulate their concern, I haven’t heard one that isn’t on the lines of “I want to be able to use this code in my paid product”…
As others have said, you’re changing the topic talking about FUTO’s license in a response to a comment about the AGPL.
But to continue your thread:
I specifically want anyone to be allowed to use any and all FOSS software I write (and I do write and publish some) commercially, so long as they abide by the terms of the license I choose. (Typically the AGPLv3.)
If, for instance, a mainstream commercial consumer electronics device incorporated my code into the firmware and because my code is under the AGPLv3, end users had the legal right to demand the means to modify the behavior of their devices to better suit them, I’d be thrilled.
Plus, if a company with an IT department is distributing a modified version of my code, that might well include some improvements generally useful for all/most/many users of my project. And if my projects is under the AGPLv3, I can demand a copy of the source code of their modified version and incorporate any improvements back upstream into my project so all users of my FOSS project can benefit from it.
Commercial redistribution is more of a feature than you think. I think you’re missing the point of copyleft.
Immich uses AGPL-3.0 license, so nothing you said is applicable
I said nothing about immich, the commenter you replied to seems to think because immich is under futo it’ll somehow start collecting your data. If immich was using the futo license, literally nothing will change about how we use it… People are freaking out and inventing ridiculous scenarios and they don’t understand what they’re objecting to (FUTO’s license).
The person I’m replying to said nothing about the license, only talked about immich the application. If you want to speak about the futo license ok, but understand just changing the topic isn’t a good way to start a conversation.
A backdoor in what, exactly?? Please do some research into the programs you’re running so you can base your opinions on that knowledge rather than vibes.