this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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Such a bummer that they took over Immich
Immich is fine.. full FOSS and alive. I just dont get you people.
What keeps them from changing the Immich license from AGPL to FUTO?
Copyright.
AGPL says that the original author of any chunk of code owns the copyright to it.
Meaning to change the license you have to get every copyright holder (read every developer who has contributed code) to agree to the license change and give over the copy right.
Edit: to be clear, I don't like FUTO either. As a visible minority, I know libertarians are not my friends. But a copyright rug pull is hard to do in immich.
From what I'm seeing, you're right. If there was a contributor assignment policy (some official policy associated with Immich saying that by submitting a PR, you agree to assign copyright on your code changes go the Immich project), FUTO could change the license on future versions as they wished. But it doesn't look like there's any contributor assignment or contributor license agreement on Immich.
To be pedantic, Immich did change from MIT to AGPLv3 a while ago. FUTO could technically scrap the current version, grab the last MIT version of the code, relicense it under their "source-first" license (or any other license they like, pretty much), and declare "this is now the official development version of Immich from which new releases will come." That would be drastic even for FUTO, though (I don't think that's likely any time soon), and the community could then fork the latest AGPLv3 version with a different name and carry on with development.
Once you go copy left, you need everyone's consent to change the license.
The MIT license is the creator owns the copyright, and any changes you contribute are licesned under the sam MIT as the project.
So to go from MIt -> anything only requires the consent of the project onwer.
Any copy left (like AGPL) license -> anything requires every contributors consent.
It is possible, but practically infeasible at scale.
I'd have to read more about AGPL, but IIRC GPLv2 says you must license any derived code as the same license.
IANAL, just someone whose looked into this before.
What did they do to immich?!
Funded a team of devs to work on it full time.
Also made it shareware.
Pls explain. I cannot see how it is shareware with an AGPL licence behind it and full code published. Or is it just fud ?
fud, it's "shareware" in the sense that there's a dismissable popup that asks you to pretty please pay 100$, but it's AGPLv3 and no features are locked behind the paywall.
Huh. So anyone could maintain a fork or patchset and distribute builds that were feature-for-feature identical to Immich but with no nag screens. Just an interesting thought.
So immch is dead before it even matured enough to be reliable? Sad.
Still struggling to understand what makes it "dead."
It's a big disappointment because the facial recognition is great, meaning that they could be doing bad things behind the scene. They could have a backdoor so their buddies could check to see if you're Hispanic or non-white. That's just one thing. Could is not is. But its enough to make me stop and think of uninstalling.
A backdoor in what, exactly?? Please do some research into the programs you're running so you can base your opinions on that knowledge rather than vibes.
It's still open source, not sure where this is coming from