Welcome to version v1.109.0 of Immich. This release introduces an additional way for you to support Immich financially as well as bug fixes for various issues. Some of the highlights in this release include:
- Immich licenses (and https://buy.immich.app)
- “My Immich” url forwarder (https://my.immich.app)
- Notable fix: Generate thumbnail for iOS18 HEIC
- Notable fix: Generate Motion Photos for Pixel 6, 7, and 8
Immich license pricing is $25 per user or $99 per server for a lifetime license.
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For me, the license stuff is odd. They offer a license model with two tiers (user / server), yet the license seems to do nothing (except showing a little badge). 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.
Ok, that’s weird then.
FUTO’s goal is to change FOSS culture. Away from “donations” and towards “payment”, to make development sustainable.
The only problem is that there’s no way to make a recurring payment even if I wanted to, which would be more sustainable than one-time purchases.
Then don’t 🤷 you don’t have to.
I think they have succeeded in pissing people off
Change usually does.
Yeah but why not both? Extra support shouldn’t hurt.
We don’t have both.
So “it’s weird then”. As I said. And basically as the person I answered to said.
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
I will wait for the “AIO Immich Ultimate Keygen” by Razor1911 ☝🏻😂
They’ll supply a giant paper manual, and you’ll have to look through it to find the key. DRM, 1980s style.
… each time the server restart and randomly during login.
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
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
From Discord
Copy this to custom CSS in the adminpanel and the license banner is gone:
.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.
FUTO is the same organization that doesn’t believe in Foss. The want one creator to have power over users. I don’t think that model is going to work out.
That’s not quite their position. They believe the OSI decides what counts as Open Source based on what benefits big tech who fund them. Basically, they think it’s wrong to argue that something cannot be considered open source unless Google is allowed to use the free labour of contributers without restriction or payment.
They talk more about it here and here.
Personally I don’t have a side in this fight but nothing I have seen has made me shy away from using their products.
Tbh it’s the English language that decides what counts as Open Source. Free/Open Source software has been established for decades at this point. It’s good that they changed the name to “Source First”.
I think that better wording would be “the organization that doesn’t believe that foss solves every problem”. For project like immich AGPL is completely fine but for the android keyboard it might not be a good idea to allow Google to use it to abuse their customers.
It isn’t open source or free software. There software prevents you from having the same rights as the parent organization. You can’t fork the project if there is a big development shift you don’t like so it is effectively proprietary.
Yes you can, you just cant change the payment links
Sorry I though you were talking about Grayjay.
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.
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.
I don’t have problems with selling software. I do have a problem with what FUTO is doing. The just up ended a perfectly good financial model and make the “licensing” feel like Windows server.
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
It is just bizarre
- User license is only there to make it cheaper for small instances.
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.
This is not a subscription but a perpetual license and for my needs it’s already well worth the price they are asking. Using this actively with my wife but also sharing albums with about 8 other family members.
I find the no-subscription model very attractive and I’m open minded to companies trying out new software licensing approaches. I like the idea of the developers getting paid for their good work and being able to do it full time.
Yeah, I am very very tempted to go for it, mainly because it is not a subscription. I wish it would have been less than $100 though, but I am not arguing about that since whatever I feel I would want to pay is probably less than they would think is OK.
That’s the thing, if the project is too early to have a stable enough structure to allow for programatical updates then it’s probably too early to offer something “perpetual”
Having everything on latest seems a very bad idea.
Why? Latest means latest stable for most services
Latest also means automatic major upgrades without doing the steps necessary for said upgrade, or breaking functionality/changes.
See: https://medium.com/@mccode/the-misunderstood-docker-tag-latest-af3babfd6375
https://vsupalov.com/docker-latest-tag/
https://cloudmaniac.net/docker-container-never-use-latest-cicd-pipeline/
That’s interesting, although most of it is directed at people building the images, the fact that pushing without a tag sets the latest is something I did not know and something that I could see the human factor causing a problem.
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.
But this is not a subscription yet. Its a lifetime license. Of course they might change terms, you never know.
I mean… It’s perfectly usable as it is. Even though it’s still in early development, it already has more feature than basically every competitor (except Google Photos maybe)
I agree, I’m not trying to bad mouth the project, I just feel that they shouldn’t change from a donation structure until they have a stable version of the product.
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.
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’ve been extremely transparent about this:
That video is new
Streamed 2 months ago? They announced joining FUTO on 1st May 2024 (in the immich discord anyway) and announced the livestream then.
I think the app a quite older than than . Or not?
Immich is older than that video yes?
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
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.
I use nginx reverse proxy on Jellyfin (and a bunch of other services as well) and it’s working great. Maybe you have some weird setup or complex situation.
I have a boat load of stuff thru nginx. Using nginx-proxymanager. Dunno if I need to add any special parameters for Jellyfin. Tailscale Funnel is working fine for now.
If you could share your settings for your nginx setup, that might help me.
I don’t use NPM but directly nginx. All my nginx general setup and per-service specific settings are here: https://wiki.gardiol.org
There is a global page for the reverse proxy, and then each service I tried/use has its own setup page.
Awesome! Thanks so much!
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.
I am a huge fan of immich, been running it for quite a while, it started as just phone photo backup but it’s good enough that I’ve made it my primary photo repository (fully backed up of course). I will absolutely pay for a license but count me as one who doesn’t really like the terminology used.
I would happily put a donated or supporter badge to show off, but the unlicensed just feels a bit wrong. I have no trouble paying for software, especially as useful as immich, but in the enshittifying world we live in, such language gives one pause.
good news, the terminology is changing
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.
Immich license pricing is $25 per user or $99 per server for a lifetime license.
What if I already gave them >$100?
In the discord they said they will give you a license, and they’re planning to do it automatically
But there’s nothing tying that donation to my account, so how could they do that?
If they have an email address they can send a license key
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.
