As others have said, you’re changing the topic talking about FUTO’s license in a response to a comment about the AGPL.

But to continue your thread:

If you ask them to articulate their concern, I haven’t heard one that isn’t on the lines of “I want to be able to use this code in my paid product”…

I specifically want anyone to be allowed to use any and all FOSS software I write (and I do write and publish some) commercially, so long as they abide by the terms of the license I choose. (Typically the AGPLv3.)

If, for instance, a mainstream commercial consumer electronics device incorporated my code into the firmware and because my code is under the AGPLv3, end users had the legal right to demand the means to modify the behavior of their devices to better suit them, I’d be thrilled.

Plus, if a company with an IT department is distributing a modified version of my code, that might well include some improvements generally useful for all/most/many users of my project. And if my projects is under the AGPLv3, I can demand a copy of the source code of their modified version and incorporate any improvements back upstream into my project so all users of my FOSS project can benefit from it.

Commercial redistribution is more of a feature than you think. I think you’re missing the point of copyleft.

Nothing about copyleft causes the “owner” to not hold the copyright on a work.

Copyright gives the holder (either the author or the party to which the copyright is assigned) a few specific (but broad) exclusive rights to the work: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution, public performance (which probably doesn’t so much apply to software), and public display (also not applicable to software, so much). (And then there’s circumvention, but that’s yucky and irrelevant to this case, so we’ll ignore it.)

“Exclusive” means nobody is allowed to do any of those things except the copyright holder (unless the copyright holder licenses those rights to others, but we’ll get to that.)

The copyright holder can give/sell/transfer the copyright to someone else (in which case the previous holder is now excluded from doing with the work all the things in the first paragraph above because someone else now holds all those exclusive rights), but that’s not what the AGPL does.

The copyright holder can also license any or all of the exclusive rights in the first paragraph to some person or party (or in the case of an “open license” like the AGPL, to everyone).

The AGPL licenses rights like distribution and preparation of derivative works to others (under certain conditions(/covenants) like “you can only distribute copies if you do so under the same license as you got it under”).

So, if some hypothetical party named “Bob” started a project, they’d hold the copyright. If Bob put the AGPL on that project and also required any contributor to assign copyright on their specific contributions to Bob, Bob would hold the copyright on the entire project code, including all contributions. Someone else could take advantage of the terms of the AGPL allowing derivative works and redistribution to create their own fork (so long as they abided by the conditions(/covenants) in the AGPL), and if they did so, they could omit on their fork any copyright assignment requirement, in which case the fork could end up owned by a mishmash of different copyright holders (making it hard to impossible for the administrator of the fork to do anything tricky like changing what license future versions were under.)

However, on Bob’s original (non-fork) version, if Bob, as the copyright holder, changes the license file to something proprietary, Bob has (arguably?) created a new work that is not the same work as the previous version, and Bob can license that new version under a different license. (I suppose one might be able to argue that changing just the license file isn’t legally enough to make a new version, but the very next time a nontrivial change was made to the codebase, that would qualify as a new version, so it kindof doesn’t matter.) Bob has already licensed previous versions of his non-fork under the AGPL, so Bob can’t really rescind that license already granted on older versions. But new versions could indeed be put under a different license. (Mind you, there are licenses that have specific terms that make them rescindable on old versions. Take for instance the Open Gaming License fiasco that WotC tried to pull not terribly long ago. But I don’t think the AGPL is a license that can be rescinded.)

Since Bob can’t rescind the license on older versions, if Bob made a future version proprietary, the community or any particular party that wanted to could take the last AGPL version of the non-fork and make a fork from there that remained under the AGPL.

The moral of the story is: if you don’t want the copylefted code project you start to be changed to a proprietary license later, don’t do any copyright assignment agreement. The codebase being owned by a diverse mishmash of different copyright holders is a feature, not a bug.

And, as mentioned elsewhere in this post, Immich is owned by a lot of different copyright holders as it has no copyright assignment requirement.

Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?

Well, there’s Corey Doctorow, of course. He literally wrote the book on Enshittification.

There are definitely more “behind the scenes” folks doing a lot for that particular cause who don’t so much have a following of anywhere near the same size, but nonetheless do fight enshittification in big ways. Bradley Kuhn comes to mind.

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.

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.

That is not supporting fascist projects

Literally what I just said in the comment you responded to.

Ah. My mistake. I’ll edit my comment.

Edit: According to another comment in this post, FUTO “took over” Immich. Seems like maybe Immich was AGPLv3 before FUTO got hold of it. Still qualifies as “one of FUTO’s projects”, and your point is still well made, but it does still add a bit of context, and honestly I have to wonder whether future versions of Immich will remain FOSS.

The article I linked in another comment explains more, but Eron Wolf, founder of FUTO, kindof pressured or hoodwinked Louis Rossmann into publicly interviewing Curtis Yarvin who happily refers to himself as a “reactionary fascist” and publicly states that black people are inherently suitable for enslavement.

I don’t know that it’s so much that they support “fascist projects” as much as they go out of their way to be a platform for spreading fascist propaganda, and particularly promoting the fascist Curtis Yarvin.

This is all in reference to this article.

FUTO is an organization that talks a lot of rhetoric about being some bastion of consumer rights in tech, but they’re doing a lot of shitty, shady, and downright evil things. Among them, FUTO has been in the practice of making small grants to FOSS projects (like ffmpeg and musl) and then plastering the FOSS project’s name and logo all over the FUTO site in a way that makes it seem as if FUTO is endorsed by said FOSS projects when that’s not the case at all.

(All this after doing everything in their power with their rhetoric to try to discredit and degrade the entire FOSS community. They wrote an “apology”, but even in the apology, they express their “disdain for OSI approved licenses”. Mind you, none of FUTO’s projects are Open Source most of their projects are proprietary.)

After that article came out just a couple of days ago, apparently they redid their site, I’d have to guess in an effort to address the concern that the way FUTO presented their grant program before implied endorsement by a lot of FOSS projects that didn’t endorse them in any way. I don’t think they’ve done enough, and there are tons of other reasons to think FUTO is evil assholes using consumer rights rhetoric to manipulate people in service to its (fully for-profit) bottom line.

Other concerns in the article include FUTO’s connection to explicit/proud fascists and using their platform to (even coercing Louis Rossmann into) spread fascist propaganda.

And I’ve got plenty more to say about how evil FUTO is.

Doubtful, unfortunately. FUTO seems like the sort of narcissistic assholes who won’t be swayed in any way, shape, or form

There’s no third option between FOSS and proprietary (unless there are licenses that match the Free Software definition but not the Open Source definition or vice versa, I suppose, but I’m not aware of any). All software that is not FOSS is proprietary by definition, whether the source is available or not. It’s not “disingenuous” to call FUTO software proprietary. It’s simply factual.

They’re openly disdainful of all things Open Source and OSI, and their software is not Open Source.

They’re a fully for-profit company using consumer rights kind of rhetoric to manipulate people in service to FUTO’s own pocketbook. Don’t fall for their use of the .org tld or promises to “never abuse customers”.

I’ve written many times about what assholes FUTO is. I’m fully convinced they’re way more part of the problem than part of the solution and they’re not to be trusted.

They’ve soured me on Rossman. Back when he was doing coverage of things like the court cases around right to repair and tractors and stuff, I watched a few videos of his and thought he was awesome. And then he got involved with FUTO and started billing Grayjay as “Open Source” and I’ve gotten sufficiently disillusioned with FUTO that I haven’t followed Rossman at all. I’ve got coworkers changing their avatars to Clippy and shit, and I believe their hearts are in the right place, but I can’t in good conscience really get behind anything or anyone associated with FUTO.

Edit: Oh. I honesty didn’t even see this OP was a link to an article. Lol. Now I’m very interested to go read that article.

Edit 2: Shite. I’ve now read the article. I knew FUTO was assholes in a lot of different ways, but now I know how deeply, completely irredeemable they really are.

Damn. They’re basing it all on LineageOS. I was hoping they’d make it a GNU/Linux phone.

I can’t dare to hope ~that it’s about to go to zero~.

AI is where former cryptocurrency companies pivoted when mining cryptocurrency stopped being profitable. There’s nothing left to pivot back to. Even those who have drunk the blockchain Koolaid don’t think there’s money in mining. Just gambling by investing with real money and hoping someone will give you more real money than you bought it with.

My first thought was something along the lines of a “zip bomb”. For every “M” in the input string, it’d use more than a KiB of memory. But still, it’d take a string of millions of "M"s to exhaust memory on even a low-end modern server. Still probably not a good idea to expose to untrusted input on a public networked server, though. And it could easily peg a CPU core for a good while. Very good leveraged target for DDOSing.

This is the way.

You sure you didn’t get an agitated cicada stuck in there?

Seriously, though. It could be the stepper or even just a cooling fan.

Freedom is to proprietary as libertarian is to authoritarian. Tradition is to distruption as political right is to political left. Better would be for the x axis to be left-to-right disruption->tradition and the y axis to be bottom-to-top freedom->proprietary. So, rotated 90° counterclockwise and then mirrored left-to-right.

Oh boy. Minority Report, but with hallucinations.