tldr is that you can hide the button that asks for payment and it says “purchase immich” instead of “purchase liscence”
If I understand correctly, it’s just a fancy donation?
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/11186
- Will there be any paywalled features?
No, there will never be any paywalled features.
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.
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.
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…)
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.
Overall I think Alex handled this situation really well, listened to what people wanted and come to something that everyone’s fine with.
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).
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).
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).
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.
So the donation system doesn’t work? Because there isn’t much difference. Just adding a fixed ammmount $
