tldr is that you can hide the button that asks for payment and it says “purchase immich” instead of “purchase liscence”
Overall I think Alex handled this situation really well, listened to what people wanted and come to something that everyone’s fine with.
So the donation system doesn’t work? Because there isn’t much difference. Just adding a fixed ammmount $
It frames it as a payment and not a donation, more people buy it when its like that
The wording is still misleading because you aren’t purchasing immich and if you were, what exactly would you be purchasing? Control of the project? The immich name? You aren’t purchasing a license to use it as you already have that. A supporters badge key? Okay well be upfront that that is what you are selling because you aren’t selling immich itself.
You’re keeping the project alive. You’re purchasing the ability to continue using a project that will sustain and continue to get updates and add features.
I agree it is not clear, but it’s also hard to say that in one or two words.
None of those things are true. Paying money is in no way guaranteeing the current developers will wake up wanting to maintain it tomorrow, nor am I purchasing access to an update service. It isn’t a purchase of anything and shouldn’t be framed as one. It’s a Contribution or a donation that gives nothing in return and saying it’s something else is dishonest.
Plus they already had donations set up before this.
If I understand correctly, it’s just a fancy donation?
Yeah, functionally it’s the same. However I think it is a big perceptual change to be in line with the FUTO principle of “we want to make good software that is open and accessible, but we would also like you to pay us for it so we can continue this project sustainably.” That’s a bit of a contrast with the general open source approach of “I’m writing this software as a service to others, make a donation if you’d like to support my work.”
Personally I think the move towards a more structured buy it if you can mindset is great. I’ve seen too many projects get abandoned because of lack of time and resources and then shift from developer to developer, sometimes getting better, sometimes worse.
Except it’s misleading as you aren’t really buying it, you are buying a supporters badge key as I understand it. Might as well be selling an immich NFT. I still don’t think this is being upfront and it’s still a dark pattern it’s just slightly less misleading than the blatantly false buy a license wording.
So basically WinRAR
Is immich in a usable state yet? I was looking for a self-hosted image service a while back, but eventually I just went with pigallery2 mostly due to the extremely simple file storage (just point to a folder and you’re good to go), but I do miss being able to manage images/albums from the website and having a more mobile friendly version. I kind of avoided immich due to the repo saying it’s under very active development (#scary).
I can’t compare it to pigallery, but imo it really isn’t fully usable. Lots of bugs for me. I’m still running it but waiting for it to be ready to replace Google photos. It has transcoding errors in the logs and file tracking issues (extra files). All of my recent motion photos are not detected. And I have read on GitHub that they are still working on fleshing out automated repair tasks.
I don’t really get what’s the fuss about… We’ve all ran unlicensed trial software (like WinRAR) for years and nobody bat an eye.
“Purchasing Immich”
Since when do I have to purchase something made from the community? This is incredibly dumb on so many levels. You don’t sell other peoples work on a project like this.
Create a donation banner at the bottom that popups up on a new release. You will have much better luck.
