cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12624334
Ente - Open sourcing our server
AGPL-3.0
Nice
I’m trying to learn about licensing. Why do you like AGPL-3.0 compared to others?
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.
Only really nice when not CLA is required and every contributor retains their copyright. Ente doesn’t seem to require a CLA.
Otherwise it allows the owner to just take the changes from their contributors and change the license at a later date.
edit: the two issues i raised in this comment had both already been addressed.
this was the developer’s reply on matrix:
- We do have a CLA: https://cla-assistant.io/ente-io/ente
- 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
- The portion of the document that deals with authentication has been outdated, my bad.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/
here is my original comment
AGPL-3.0
Nice
This would be nice, but, this repo includes an iOS app, and AGPL3 binaries cannot be distributed via Apple’s App Store!
AGPL3 (without a special exception for Apple, like NextCloud’s iOS app has) is incompatible with iOS due to the four paragraphs of the license which mention “Installation Information” (known as the anti-tivoization clause).
Only the copyright holder(s) are able to grant Apple permission to distribute binaries of AGPL3-licensed software to iOS users under non-AGPL3 terms.
Every seemingly-(A)GPL3 app on Apple’s App Store has either copyright assignment so that a single entity has the sole right to distribute binaries in the App Store (eg, Signal messenger) or uses a modified license to carve out an Apple-specific exception to the anti-tivoization clause (eg, NextCloud). In my opinion, the first approach is faux free software, because anyone forking the software is not allowed to distribute it via the channel where the vast majority of users get their apps. (In either case, users aren’t allowed to run their own modified versions themselves without agreeing to additional terms from Apple, which is part of what the anti-tivoization clause is meant to prevent.)
Only really nice when not CLA is required and every contributor retains their copyright. Ente doesn’t seem to require a CLA.
I definitely agree here! But if it’s true that they’re accepting contributions without a CLA, and they haven’t added any iOS exception to their AGPL3 license, then they themselves would not be allowed to ship their own iOS app with 3rd party contributions to it! 😱 edit: it’s possible this is the case and Apple just hasn’t noticed yet, but that is not a sustainable situation if so.
If anyone reading this uses this software, especially on iOS, I highly recommend that you send the developers a link to this comment and encourage them to (after getting the consent of all copyright holders) add something akin to NextCloud’s COPYING.iOS to their repository ASAP.
cc @ioslife@lemmy.ml @baduhai@sopuli.xyz @skariko@feddit.it
(i’m not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, lol)
edit: in case a dev actually sees this… skimming your architecture document it looks like when a user’s email is compromised (“after you successfully verify your email”), the attacker is given the encryptedMasterKey (encrypted with keyEncryptionKey, which is derived from a passphrase) which lets them perform an offline brute-force attack on the passphrase. Wouldn’t it make more sense to require the user to demonstrate knowledge of their passphrase to the server prior to giving them the encryptedMasterKey? For instance, when deriving keyEncryptionKey, you could also derive another value which is stored on the server and which the client must present prior to receiving their encryptedMasterKey. The server has the opportunity to do offline attacks on the passphrase either way, so it seems like there wouldn’t be a downside to this change. tldr: you shouldn’t let adversaries who have compromised a user’s email account have the ability to attack the passphrase offline.
(i’m not a cryptographer, but this is cryptography advice)
That’s complicated to do correctly. Normally, for the server to verify the user has the correct password, it needs to know or receive the password, at which point it could decrypt all the user’s files. They’d need to implement something like SRP.
Ente doesn’t seem to require a CLA.
It turns out, they do have a CLA (with full copyright assignment 😢).
How does ente photos compare to immich?
I love immich, but I’m going to settle for something that doesn’t require to modify the compose every couple of months due to breaking changes. Trying to apply changes for two breaking updates in one go killed it for me.
I’ll check this one for the time being
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.
Does photoprism support multiple users yet? That was what drove me to immich. But I also don’t love the frequency of breaking changes.
I did use it in the past! I should check it again. I didn’t like how the multi user was planned (basically independent instances), but was long enough things might have changed.
The 1.95 update was trivially easy to update with their instructions if you already have the skill to use docker compose.
Good, once I can trivially not follow instructions between updates I’ll check it again.
This is not a criticisms got immich, once they are in the stable phase I’ll try, just I don’t have the time to be checking the notes every update just in case.
My stack is very large, I rather use sw that requires little to no micromanaging.
We’ve consolidated all our code into a single repository – just clone ente-io/ente on GitHub, and you will have at your disposal a state of the art, end-to-end encrypted, full stack (mobile/web/desktop clients, the server, and a CLI to boot) alternative to Google Photos and Apple Photos.
This seems a disadvantage, a single repo that does everything seems inconvenient and unnecessarily complex for a casual hobbyist that wants to try the project
The flutter apps and the electron app are unrelated to the server+web.
Same for the separate 2fa app
If you want to contribute to something you need to fork everything.
Because this contains everything that is served by ente in their commercial offer in the way that’s suited in a professional way (photos stored in S3-like storage on minio server), not just photos, also future projects you might not want to run on your server like ente lock and ente legacy
If you really want to serve the self-hosting community, please improve your documentation. As someone unfamiliar with this product, I have no idea what to do with this once I clone the repo. I hunted and found a compose.yaml file, but it’s not clear if this is all I need.
The docs directory literally has a stub on getting the repo up and serving and also a note that they are cleaning up and working on the documentation https://github.com/ente-io/ente/tree/main/docs
I swear people will not do even the most basic reading before complaining
Happy to see some alternatives, but I’m a very happy user of PhotoPrism (+PhotoSync) so will stay there for now. Agreed that encrypted at rest isn’t all that helpful for a self-hoster.
