Ente - Open sourcing our server

The AGPL applies copyleft to web services. If you're learning about licensing, it might be worth googling copyleft. Fascinating concept, and, in my opinion, something to subscribe to.

If you haven't already, check out https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ . This gives a broad overview of the common open source licenses. And if you're just starting out, one of the first things you'll want to learn is that the licenses fall into either a permissive or copyleft category. You'll want to make sure you understand the difference between those broad categories.

Shortly, permissive have less to no strings attached to use their code, and copyleft requires you to retain the same licensing terms meaning if you publish under GPLv3 then someone using/ modifying your code needs to also publish under GPLv3. Copyleft licenses ensure that open source code stays open source.

In very basic terms - GPL means that any modifications you make to a code base and distribute to public, you need to keep the license as GPL and open source all your modifications.

Once cloud started becoming a thing, the cloud vendors went "Well ackchyually🤓, the code changes we're making are hosted on OUR server so we're not technically distributing them to the public. So fuck you we have no obligation to make them open source".

Which is why AGPL exists so even server side code needs to be public. Since the application in question here is a backend service, it'll always be used server side and so any forks need to be open source.

edit: the two issues i raised in this comment had both already been addressed.

this was the developer's reply on matrix:

1. We do have a CLA: https://cla-assistant.io/ente-io/ente
2. We will update the iOS app to offer you an option to point to your self hosted instance (so that you can save yourself the trouble of building it): https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/504
3. The portion of the document that deals with authentication has been outdated, my bad. We've adopted SRP to fix the concerns that were pointed out: https://ente.io/blog/ente-adopts-secure-remote-passwords/

Ente doesn’t seem to require a CLA.

It turns out, they do have a CLA (with full copyright assignment 😢).

If you haven’t already ruled it out, I recommend checking out Photoprism. It was the first app I ever self-hosted using Docker and I haven’t needed to change my config because of breaking changes yet.

I understand this, but that way you always read the update notes and you control what version you install. This can be a good practice.

That stuff breaks is not so nice though.

The 1.95 update was trivially easy to update with their instructions if you already have the skill to use docker compose.

How is that worse than multiple repos?

I don't think so Tim! Just stick it all in one repo/compose file and smash the 'go' button. Are you paying by the directory or something?

I swear people will not do even the most basic reading before complaining

It's a stub and almost worthless.

Remotely hacking into my server is probably harder than just walking into my home with a warrant and confiscate everything.

No, but thats what TLS does absolutely fine.

Their model is that the server doesn't know what the pictures are.

Which is fine. It's cool that it exists as an option, especially with someone else hosting your pictures. But it's not for me. I want my server to see my pictures so it can play with them.