Comment on Futo updates their website, removing logos, clarifying micro grants
DoPeopleLookHere@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoCopyright.
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.
TootSweet@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
3abas@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
If they pulled that off, a community spinoff from that same version would become the new immich killer. Not the first time it’s happened, and the current maintainers aren’t the only ones capable of maintaining it.
DoPeopleLookHere@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
yistdaj@pawb.social 7 hours ago
As far as I’m aware, contributor license agreements can include a clause stating that you agree to hand over copyright on submission of code. If every contributor has signed the CLA, there is only only one copyright holder, making relicensing easy.
However, successfully using this to relicense to something less open is extremely rare.
DoPeopleLookHere@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Yes, however those aren’t “copy left” licenses like AGPL whose defining feature is the owner not holding copyright