Immich v1.109.1 released with optional paid license

From Discord

Copy this to custom CSS in the adminpanel and the license banner is gone:

css

    
.license-status{
display:none !important;
}

It is possible to set the status to licensed too vua the database, but I didn't try it.

I hope it will only be this banner. Kavita has had a donation button too and 2 updates further it was a floating button. The whole thing about licensing is heavily discussed on Discord.

I just hope they don't destroy this beautiful product.
- Immich joined FUTO, and FUTO's model is that their stuff costs money but if you haven't paid you're not restricted.
  A bit weird but they (FUTO) are trying to experiment with a new model.
Yep and eventually there will be a paid proprietary version. That's usually how it goes. I hope I am wrong.
- They promised at least that's not how they're going to do this, at least. But in the end, it's easy to backpaddle on these promises.
  Still: you can always fork the project.
- Would be very difficult to switch licenses away from GPL3
If worse comes to shovel the community could fork it. That would be very hard and seriously detrimental but if they start pulling crap like this it might be time.

For me, the license stuff is odd. They offer a license model with two tiers (user / server), yet the license seems to do nothing. Also, it is a one time payment which will likely not be substantial in the future.

Why not create a "supporter" tier for maybe $2 per month or so, this would bring some recurring income without the fears of paywalling the product.

They already accept donations as a means of continuous support. So I guess this is now just another channel for people who prefer buying a license over using github donations.
Edit: oh I just realized they stopped donations with the restructuring. Ok, that's weird then.
- How dare you pay continued support. You will have a one time fee and be happy.
  I can't wait until they make you hand enter a 30 character license key
This is basically the doing of the futo non profit, they ate testing out if open source software can be profittable.
Louis Rossmann has a lot of videos about them (he works for them)
From what I get, you can just use it for free, but they don't say it is free to compell more people to buy it.
- So basically WinRAR
- They completely miss the point of free software. The idea is that you can fork it after a hostel take over. The irony is that if they start forcing anti features they might end up with the community jumping ship.
That would make sense. They could even give you a badge or send you merch if you are a bigger supporter.
Stuff like this is why I can't support FUTO

Declaring the use without a paid license as “Unlicensed” is very misleading since the project is also licensed under the GNU AGPL v3.0.

That's FUTO for you

Is feel a lot better about this if it was a "supporter" tag not this "unlicensed" crap.

Yeah this terminology just gives me the impression they don't consider the AGPL to an actual license
- It also raises red flags about what they (hopefully don't) have in mind for the future
They should just have you pay to have your name listed on the list of supporters

After listening the video where they discussed immich joining futo, I don't have any worries. I have high hopes futo might actually be the company I have long hoped would emerge. Time will certainly tell.

I think people are getting hung up on the word license too much. Though I agree futo should have gone with a better word choice for clarity. License just means supporter in this case.

I’ll repeat here what I said on discord:

I’m no fan of stallman, but I like his quote: “I’m happy to pay for good software so long as it’s free”.

It’s important to remember that anyone with the skill to work on this project could earn a pretty good living elsewhere. We can debate the terminology, but at the end of the day devs gotta eat.

Personally, so long as it stays on the GPL they can call us “god-kings” and “filthy peasants” for all I care

Important bits that came up in the discord and I haven’t seen here:

User license is only there to make it cheaper for small instances.~~No word I’ve seen on transitioning from a user license to a server license down the road.~~ Looks like you can switch by contacting them, and they have plans to do it automatically in the future.
It looks like enforcement is basically nonexistent. You could activate multiple servers with one license, or just flip a value in the db yourself
The reason they aren’t using “supporter” or “contributor” is because they don’t want it to sound like charity. It’s a transaction.

Immich is free software. That means anyone can fork and maintain the code and they have the same rights as everyone. Trying to squeeze money out of people is slimy. They should either stay a community project and ask for donations to fund it (paid versions count as donations as long as there isn't extra exclusive features implemented in non libre code) or they could start a company that sell backups and support.
- Selling copies of free software is straight up encouraged by the FSF. You don't have to buy a copy. You can copy the source code and build t yourself. But selling it is legitimate.
- As you said it's free software, and the license for immich is actually open source. I'm not really offended by a please donate nagware screen, or even a give a cup of coffee to the developer, so this license is the same thing just with different language. And as it's open source somebody could fork the project to remove this line, or you could edit the database and fill it, it's totally up to you.
  I think this is a net positive and should be encouraged

They could have achieved the same without any license keys. Just a "Purchase" button along with an "Already purchased" one. You make the ethical judgement as to which one to click. The purchase page could have a few suggested prices along with a pay what you want option, one time and recurring.

Also I'm not too sure why FUTO are allergic to the term Donate. There's a whole generation of people who got taught how it works and what it does by Wikipedia. Slap a funding bar with a brief explanation for what it funds, add the donation options and everyone would know what's it for and why they should donate if they can.

Anyway. Purchased the thing and I'll keep supporting them till it's GPL.

I think it's a psychological barrier, donate implies totally optional.
License, purchase, makes it more transactional mentally, and tries to make it clear that this project needs support to be sustainable.
Also I’m not too sure why FUTO are allergic to the term Donate.
In the business world of taxes and such, companies might not want to accept donations as they might be required to pay most of it back in taxes. It all depends on the tax laws in their juristiction.

I don't mind this model. That being said for me Immich is great but has a fatal flaw that has prevented me from using it: it doesn't do updates.

For me that's a big one, everything else I self host I have a docker compose pointing to latest, so eventually I do a pull and up and I'm done, running the latest version of the thing. In Immich this is not possible, I discovered the hard way that they are not backwards compatible and that if you do that you need to keep track of their release notes to know what you need to manually do to update.

I haven't settled on a self-hosted photo management because of this. In theory Immich has almost everything I want (or more specifically, all of the other solutions I found lack something), but having to keep track of releases to do manual upgrades is stupid, this is a software, it should be easy to have it check the version on start and perform migration tasks if needed.

This just means that this project is still too early in development for you. The breaking changes happening in this phase are going to pay off in the long run and prevent the project from getting bogged down.
I would give it another shot when they release v2
- Yeah, I have high hopes for the project, it ticks almost every box for me. I would still prefer to be able to store tags in the actual images and use them and also be able to recover a library already in the proper folder (so in the case of a catastrophic failure, reimporting the full library is a matter of minutes not days, not to mention having to retag people, etc).
  My point is that projects should ask for donations when they're so early in development, asking for a subscription implies you have a stable product.
Having everything on latest seems a very bad idea.
- Why? Latest means latest stable for most services
Well, they do say, that it is in very active development. There will be a time when updates get more stable and where they will offer an automated update path, just not now.
- Yup, and I'm fine with that, but I think that switching from a donation to a subscription model before then is wrong.
No need to update unless they're is a feature or security patch.
Updating to latest could result in not knowing your version in case of recovery or have an exploit pushed.

My biggest question to FUTO/Immich is if they're worried about a revenue stream, why not do something similar to Home Assistant? You never have to pay HASS a dime and never see anything to "shame" you. All you get is essentially a forwarding subdomain with some "easier" ways of doing cloud related things. There's zero "shaming" or calls to pay. I pay HASS/Nabu Casa monthly cause I'm lazy and it makes my life easier. FUTO should consider doing something similar.

Same with jellyfin.
They basically don't accept recurrent donations on purpose
https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-we-re-good-seriously
- If and when Jellyfin "needs" revenue, 100% agree. But with that post they're saying they're not worried about it, unlike FUTO/Immich.
  Hopefully one day Jellyfin will be big enough and stable enough to warrant that kind of funnel.
  Right now, I use TailScale funnel for Jellyfin. For some reason nginx just bogs it down too heavily.
  https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/funnel

EDIT: they've adjusted the language and integration of buying the Immich software. It's much clearer and balanced now. You can find the new info on their github announcements page, or likely in the notes of their next immich release.

ORIGINAL COMMENT
I was really looking forward to them opening a compensation option as I got in after they had taken down donation links, but this is all a bit weird. There is some good discussion happening on the github announcement page. I'll probably hold at version 1.108 for awhile until the dust settles.

I've gone through quite a few FUTO videos since they started sponsoring Immich, and it seems like the issue is that they are essentially an organization of engineers that don't have a strong background in the legalese of licensing (thus the lack of attention to the wording of the original FUTO temporary license). Their intentions and goals are solid from my perspective and the software they promote is fantastic, but it feels very much like an org run by idealistic engineers without much of a PR presence. The best PR they have is Louis Rossman, take that as you will 😄

All that being said, I have paid for a few of their other pieces of software that are single user. The part I'm not overly fond of is that it seems to be a payment for each individual user, and not a payment to be able to run the server itself. I'm sure there is rational behind it, but it just feels like this whole licensing element isn't fully baked yet.

I think that's reasonable, and is the impression I have of FUTO as well. I'm using their Android keyboard at least and have been impressed by it (although I don't have demanding needs).
- Me too. It's a quality app, the only other open source keyboard that rivals it in my mind is Heliboard.
There is absolutely an option to pay for the server itself, the per user option is so that it’s cheaper if you have fewer than 4. I haven’t seen anything yet about transitioning from a user license to a server license
- I'd argue that's just a license for 4+ users as the only differentiation is the dollar amount. In fact one of Alex Tran's comments in the github announcement was that they simply capped the price at $100 to keep it from getting too expensive for instances with many users. It's definitely licensing based on users, not servers.
  I would be much more comfortable if their licensing language was centered on licensing a self-hosted server, not user amounts. Paying for individual users (IMO) is best done as a hosted service with a monthly fee. They're probably a ways from being able to implement that though.
There is a server license offered with unlimited users for $100.
- I replied to a similar comment above ☝️. They call it a server license, but all the language surrounding it is centered on user counts. They are extremely generous giving the "unlimited trial period" with the high quality of Immich, but the way the licensing is being handled is just kind if confusing. At it's root, it's essentially just a request for people to pay for the service, but they've complicated it with the word choice.

good news, the terminology is changing

Why does FUTO have to shoot itself in the foot?

There is as far as I can tell no new actual license just a payment scheme and some shaming functionality. They even offer you the software if you don't pay. Remember the GPL allows them to require payment to give you the software, they just can't prohibit someone else giving you the software.

However calling unpaid copies unlicensed is incorrect, they are licensed under the GPL (just like paid ones are).

They should remove references to licensing and display something like "This instance of Immich has been paid/not been paid for." Call the key PRODUCT key.

Sure some find the "pay or shame" scheme distasteful but it is not against the GPL which allows commercial use.

This was planed from the begging of these guys developing the project. Don’t be naive guys. What o don’t like is the lack of transparency . It started as complete open and now it’s adding the “but” like many projects already did .

They need to make money somehow. And you probably don't want sponsored images in your library.
- or your pics analyzed for ads
- Like Jellyfin
They've been extremely transparent about this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cwz2iZwYpgg
- That video is new

In the discord they said they will give you a license, and they’re planning to do it automatically

I like having more ways to support the project, but I don't think "license" is the correct terminology they should use, unless they intend to release paid-only features which I'm not a fan of at all.

I wanted to like immich but I hate the way it imports images and creates its own structure.

It’s had an external library feature for awhile now
I am importing my externally synced and managed library to immich. It does not create any structure or edit the files.

I can't say I support FUTO but if they are looking to drive development I am all for it

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
Git	Popular version control system, primarily for code
HASS	Home Assistant automation software
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
nginx	Popular HTTP server

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #878 for this sub, first seen 19th Jul 2024, 06:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Wish end to end encryption was on their roadmap

Https is end to end encryption and doesn't need to be on their road map
Encryption at rest could be an option but seeing as how many other projects have trouble with it (nsxtcloud), its probably best to have this at the fike system level with disc encryption
- Small nit: Https is transport layer encryption, not commonly considered end-to-end encryption.
  For the end-to-end encryption model to work, the data must be encrypted entirely from the sender to the recipient. In the model of immich That's yourself.
  But you're right, I should have been clearer, client-side encryption, encryption at rest are better terms. But I don't want the server to ever see the unencrypted data ideally unless I am physically there requiring it to do so.
If Immich can’t analyze the images on the server then its feature set would be quite limited. It’s meant for self hosting anyway, you don’t trust your own hardware?
- you don’t trust your own hardware?
  no, I do not. Thats the whole reason data at rest should be encrypted.

Does this mean I have to pay to use immich now? Huh?

It just says you are unlicensed on the webapp. They also said no features will every be locked behind it.
No. It will remain free. Your experience of immich will be identical to someone with a paid "licence". It's like a donation.
- Except that it will taunt you on your dashboard.

Nothing like that is ever acceptable to show up on the dashboard of a service I am self hosting. Will not update Immich anymore unless they remove this garbage.