Wording change and clarification for purchasing Immich

Overall I think Alex handled this situation really well, listened to what people wanted and come to something that everyone's fine with.

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.
- So basically WinRAR
- Agree. But that’s how open pusrce is, for so many years. Until a magical model appears to keep the developers interested in giving time to it? But in the first place doing a foss project you need to understand what you are into. Monetize it after could be, if you want to live from it, but won’t be free anymore. Donation system worked pretty well for this . Don’t understand what is FUTO approach . Something similar to Proton I guess. So many people freaked out by privacy scandals, that made it a billion worth business. first with a massive amount of VPN services, some of them even from the same company and giving them different brands, browsers everywhere with same situation , then self hosting which it seems multiple developers are putting the eye on it as some fresh juice . And FUTO eyes specially
- 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.
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/11186
Will there be any paywalled features?
No, there will never be any paywalled features.
That's my understanding.
And I think a small fee to get out of the googlyclaws. Paying $100 once, to host immich for the family and supporting development is a no brainer to me.
But I understand not everyone has the resources or is willing to donate.

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).

Is immich in a usable state yet?
I've been using it for 388 days (as helpfully shown by the new buy button, nice touch), and it's been stable and rock solid the entire time.
I've had a few times it went offline, due to the breaking changes in the docker compose file because I auto-update everything, but it's always been like a 2 minute fix and it's back online.
Everything is backed up on my server nightly with incremental backups, both locally and online. So I'm not really worried about something going catastrophically wrong and deleting all my photos or something.
(just point to a folder and you’re good to go)
Immich has that in external library support, it's pretty easy to set up.
- +1 to everything you just said - I've been using Immich for a little less (370 days, thanks to the same button). It's feature rich and rock solid.
  Only thing I hope they add to the mobile app is the Years/Months/Days option, to make it easy to quickly group, then find, your photos. It's the one thing that keeps me using my phone's own Photos app (locally - no cloud sync).
Works well, i havent had any bugs, you just have to be sure to read the release notes before updating, as there are breaking changes
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've been using it for the last year or so, no issues, as long as I confirm there are no breaking changes before updating my docker container. My only real problem is that I sorely, SORELY, miss the editing features I had in Google photos. There's been more than a couple of times now that I needed to quickly edit a photo as I would have done with Google photos, and when I couldn't, got aggravated enough to consider switching back. Still chugging along on immich, though. Still holding out hope that one day they'll add at least some basic editing features.
Ente is pretty nice.
Yes.
I use Nextcloud photos
Wondering the same thing... I've been meaning to try it.
I'm using PhotoStructure at the moment. It's not as feature-rich, and the best features are only available on paid subscriptions, but it's a solid, reliable piece of software. That's what I want - a focused piece of software that favours stability over feature creep. Its deduplication is the best I've seen. The developer works on it full time, which is one of the reasons it has paid subscriptions (to make that sustainable).

Sounds great to me. Us software devs need to eat, so I totally get trying to turn this into a profitable business model. I’m very happy that they’re not paywalling any features, but honestly, I’d be fine if they did. I’m probably going to pay either way. Immich has been awesome, and it’s gotten me off of my second to last Google app, Photos. If only there were a good alternative to YouTube…

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.

I saw a lot of concern in the original github announcement regarding the use of the term "license." People felt it gave the team a legal footing to paywall features down the road and offer them only to licensed users, along with a few other concerns based in the legal implication of the term license. That of course runs counter to their statement that no features will be paywalled ever, so I guess there's still some anxiety over their trustworthiness out there. Understandable given some of the rug pulls that have happened in the open source world over the past year though (i.e Redhat, redis, etc...)
- Fair enough, though FUTO already has an anti-rugpull licence AFAIK

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
They switched away from the donations to implement this when they got acquired by FUTO

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.

"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.