this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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139
Follow up on supporting Immich announcement - change of wording (github.com)
submitted 3 months ago by voklen to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Copy/paste for the lazy:

–––––

Hello everybody,

Alex from Immich here. What a controversy that we caused with the choice of wording, right? My personal apology to you all.

On behalf of the team, we would like everyone to know that we hear your concerns and we appreciate the love and care that you all have expressed for the project. At the end of the day, what we want most is to make sure you are all happy using the app.

With that said, we are working on a change to the word license: we will not call it licensed or unlicensed anymore. What will it be called?

We are still thinking of different options to make the wording less confusing. The new wording will hopefully showcase our intentions properly going forward.

We’re also working on updating the FAQ with more information to clarify those intentions. We just want to provide good software that people will want to pay for whilst not limiting your usage in any way if you can’t.

So expect these changes over the next week. We’re pushing this out now to let you know our appreciation for the feedback you’ve given us.

The amount of purchases in the first 24 hours has been overwhelming. Thanks everyone for the great support!

Have a great weekend!

Immich team.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

I get that they're trying to figure out how to monetize it while staying kosher FOSS, and their first wording suggests they'd like to offer per-seat licensing.

What I don't get is what would compel me to get a license. I still can't rely on it for anything serious. I'm basically using it as an UI for the face recognition models and that's shoddy too. They've made it impossible to lean on it for anything else.

I don't want to sound like a hater because they're obviously working hard on it but, God, you can tell they're not professional developers and it's so frustrating. Focus on doing something well, and stop breaking compatibility every other week.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

What I don't get is what would compel me to get a license.

Ideally nothing. Maybe a sticker or a theme, but nothing important to the function of the tool. If the personal gratification that comes with offering financial support to a FOSS project (along with the resulting product itself) isn't enough, then this "license" (or whatever they end up calling it) isn't for you...ideally.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Maybe a [SUPPORTER] badge?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Should I not be able to use the software if I'm donating?

I see these comments going "oh it's still alpha, we need to encourage them". Well it should have exited alpha a long time ago, and secondly I'm not going to pay for the mere possibility of it being useful at some undetermined point in the future. Show my something useful now.

If anything, Immich has demonstrated it has no intention of ever becoming a useful project. A perpetual alpha that breaks super often and plans to remain in that state on purpose indefinitely should not be asking for any support.

Even in FOSS you have to show some modicum of practical sense. FOSS was founded on "scratch an itch" not on "break forever".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Should I not be able to use the software if I'm donating?

You should be able to use it fully regardless of whether you're donating.

I'm not going to pay for the mere possibility of it being useful at some undetermined point in the future.

That's fine, by definition, a donation means you're not paying for anything.

Immich has demonstrated it has no intention of ever becoming a useful project

I take it you haven't been in the self-hosted photo space long. Even despite their alpha status and frequent breaking of backwards compatibility, it's still the best experience I've had (comparing to Plex, Nextcloud, and Photoprism). But if you can find something better, I'm all ears.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

OK but that just means the offer for this particular type of app sucks. It doesn't make Immich good.

It's not really uncommon in the selfhosted space, there are some huge gaps. Try finding a multi-account email webapp for example, or a CalDAV/CardDAV webapp.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't follow the argument you're trying to make. Immich is fast and simple which fits my requirements where others don't. If you know of a better alternative, I'm all ears.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Immich recently had a bug where it would delete all the photos if you remove a gallery. It has breaking changes and API changes all the time. Why? I don't know. You do NOT need to break the API every other minor version, it's super dumb.

That makes it impossible to use it with other users because I can't control how and when their mobile app gets updated, which means at any given time I have no idea if their apps will work with the server version. And when they do work, they're buggy.

You can use it just for yourself if you're very careful but it's not something I can offer friends or family and promise it's better than Google Photos or iCloud. Not if it doesn't work half the time and may delete their photos every once in a while.

A simple alternative is to use a sync app to upload photos from a person's phone and then use a reliable (doesn't break all the time) photo webapp to let them browse them. They can still manage their photos locally, and use other services, and other backups and so on, they just have an extra backup + viewer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I highly recommend not relying on alpha software ever as your daily driver. I never give my photo viewing software write permissions on my images, so there's never any risk of losing data. And yeah, I'm not directing anyone outside my household to it, so I currently don't need to worry about servicing a bunch of users.

The app/webapp mismatch issue has been more annoying that I think it needs to be. I understand the need to make security updates, but breaking compatibility this often is unusual.

But again, my point is, the money you give them is a donation. If you don't want to donate, then don't. There should not be any incentive to get you to donate, besides seeing the project continue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

If you don't give immich write access to photos you lose one of their biggest advantages, i.e. having your phone upload the photos directly. So now you need something else like syncthing to do that job, which is not as elegant.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

the project is still in alpha, its normal they have breaking changes

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Alright then. We'll talk about money when it's out of alpha and stops breaking.

[–] BlueBockser 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Being in alpha and having breaking changes is fine, the question is how many. My impression is that Immich seems to introduce breaking changes far more frequently than what people might be used to from other projects.

And that does go back to professionalism: The better you plan ahead, the fewer breaking changes you have to impose on your users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Almost all oft their breaking changes over the last few months were about their docker-compose setup and the simplification of the same. They've startend out with multiple purpose-specific (micro) containers, which turned out as a Bad design decision. These changes require manual intervention but seem to be mostly finished, so I don't expect these to be many breaking changes in the forsseeable future.

The better you plan ahead, the fewer breaking changes you have to impose on your users.

I agree. From what I've read, they now have (published) plans for what's ahead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I can wait. Until then I will collect picturr folders c:

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

The impetus to pay once is supporting great Foss software. I personally think a donation model works for me but I don't research human behaviour or marketing either.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Just don’t monetarize then. Foss and community driven is just that like many other projects. Clearly these guys are trying to sell the shit

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Are you not aware of the countless issues with absolutely unsustainable open source projects out there in the wild?

We need a cultural change and a way to normalize supporting and paying (whoever can afford to) for good open source projects.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

I think they should consider the word "wages" instead.

Let's be honest, this is compensation for skilled labour.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I consider open source software to be community owned/maintained so I never liked the idea of selling the software. It makes much more sense to my eyes to sell services surrounding the software be it support, customizations, or even hosted services.

I can't really get over selling a "license" for a software that is expected to still be maintained by unpaid contributors. Especially under an AGPL license where any licensing changes has to be approved by every contributors.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I would need the iOS app to properly back up photos before I paid for it lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't think you pay for the iOS app, only the server portion can be licensed AFAIK

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You’re correct but what I mean is I’m not paying for it until it’s a stable product with a complete basic feature set. As in, I need the back up software to back up reliably, it doesn’t have to be totally complete.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah it logs my dad (who has an iphone) out sometimes

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'm not sure what the right model is to get money flowing in. It seems like they took the easy route. 100 dollars for a server licence is not really that small amount considering that most server users are families? I would have preferred massive fund raising campaigns .... I'm a bit lazy and need lots of nagging to get my credit card out .... But its right these guys get some income for their work. As long as code remains AGPL ... I bet soon there will be a fork like happened with Emby. I ended up purchasing the server licence a a few month later moved to the forked version ...🙂

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

What happened with Emby? I've used their service for a long time and have been very happy with their lifetime premium.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

It used to be an open source project, then at some point the developers moved it to closed source. In reaction to this, a couple of people forked the last open source version of emby and launched it as an open source project (again) named jellyfin.

It is still open source and under active development, and has a significant userbase. Especially on Lemmy I think it's much preferred by people to emby (or at least more vocally supported).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Jellyfin is superior.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Okay..... one is closed sourced and the other open. That much I know. With those points out of the way, why is jellyfish superior?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Also been happy with emby, but am also curious about jellyfin

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Exactly. I moved to Jellyfin because Emby introduced the life time support thing

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

As soon as there's a proper backup, better built in Google photos import (immich-go exists and is awesome) and a before way to clean up the orphaned files I'll gladly drop 100 bucks on this.

My wife and i have been using it for a year. I already had all my docker volumes set external (was always confused at that initial choice) and I've not had one real breaking change. Got logged out a lot after some patches but it's been brilliant software so far. App is a little wonky and could def use some polish but overall well worth the cost for me. Same with my Plex pass although i wouldn't buy one nowadays because i think it's a but much for something that's not in anyway a "private" service unless you kind of jail it and only play locally.

[–] onlinepersona -2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What is the context of this? License vs unlicensed? What's going on?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/11186

Tldr is that theyre going for a winrar model where you have an infinite free trial, but the app is technically paid

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Except it doesn’t annoy you with popups trying to get you to buy Immich every time you open the app

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Exactly

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago

Does not really matter what wording they will put in. It is clear that project will go to pay or get nothing way. So just start working on decommissioning it. Free software really need better ways to pay developers, that will allow to avoid crap like that.