Short version of this interview is that nothing is changing, other than they’re going to be asking a flat fee “$5-20” for the app, rather than relying on donations. All donation platforms have been closed. However, if you choose not to, as Louis says “that’s between you and your God”.
Project will remain AGPL and thus can be forked at any time. FUTO maintains the trademark of Immich name and logos.
I’m currently in the process of moving my family off of Google photos to Immich. Both my partner and I pay Google at the moment because we have to due to amount of photos. And that’s only going to increase.
Immich is great but there are also a lot of bugs. The shared albums that my wider family use for example is very buggy. So paying an amount that I might have paid Google for those bugs to be fixed while self hosting I would be very happy with I think.
However, I was thinking of attacking those bugs myself and contributing bug fixes to the project. But what happens now that it’s a commercial product essentially? Will they still accept code from pull requests from outside their organisation? Will any devs who spend a lot of time contributing get anything for their work? E.g. if I was providing time and code for a product then had to pay to use it that might seem a bit mean.
That’s answered in the video. Nothing is changing. Yes, they still accept contributions.
That’s the way it’s worked since day 1.
OK cool, I missed that bit. I’ve found it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwz2iZwYpgg&t=1960s
It wasn’t a commercially backed product since day 1. This is more of a general question I guess… how does this work for open source projects like Immich when it’s commercially backed where there are some developers paid to work on it, but other developers contributing of their own accord. Would they receive some sort of benefit for having worked on it. E.g. not have to pay for using the product they’ve worked on perhaps if they meet a threshold of having contributed enough to it? I just wonder how that tends to work for open source projects which are also commercial in nature.
Open source has a long history of commercial backing. Ever heard of a little project called NextCloud? Matrix? Nothing changes. It all works the same way, because it’s still AGPL license.
So with the android app, they said they would charge for that. But I guess the .apk would be on Github but you’d pay if you installed it from the app store?
You can look at some of their existing apps to see how this works.
I have never seen contributors get anything for open source contributions.
In larger, more established projects, they explicitly make you sign an agreement that your contributions are theirs for free (in the form of a github bot that tells you this when you open a PR). Sometimes you get as much as being mentioned in a readme or changelog, but that’s pretty much it.
I’m sure there may be some examples of the opposite, I just… Wouldn’t hold my breath for it in general.
Thanks, was just curious as to what tends to happen.