this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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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.