Booklore: The Plex of self-hosted e-book libraries sparks licensing controversy and community backlash

When I first wrote about Booklore, it was a freshly released modern alternative to Calibre Web. A self-hosted platform for managing and maintaining an e-book library with a modern user interface.

However, after a recent update that resulted in a good chunk of my digital library being categorised as "physical" and therefore inaccessible, in attempting to troubleshoot the issue, some concerns were raised that highlighted potential red flags around the software.

In a heated Reddit Post, concerns were raised around code quality, with suggestions that good chunks of Booklore were vibe-coded. Judging by the number of daily commits, that doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility. While there isn't really anything wrong with vibe-coding an app, using it to create an efficient, self-hosted Docker container probably defeats the purpose. Given the accusations around vibe coding for producing poor-quality code and its propensity to delete production databases rather quickly, handing over a sizable book collection to a vibe-coded app may not be to everyone's tastes.

Additionally, concerns were raised around a rumoured switch from an AGPL license (Affero General Public License), to a BSL license (Business Source License), which "assigns to the project sponsor the right to publish contributions under non-open-source licenses, even when the project license was an open source license" without asking contributors to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). While monetising a project you have worked on isn't inherently bad or unethical, the way the developer handled the situation on Discord has been met with criticism, after failing to recognise the contributions that were made by the community.

Questions have also been raised around telemetry being sent to servers operated by the developer, despite turning the feature off in the settings (although this appears to have been resolved in later iterations of the software).

Users were also frustrated with a feature that effectively paywalled the downloading of more than one book from their own self-hosted instance. 

The developer had released "their side of the story" in a now-deleted Reddit post, which further highlights the community's frustration with the project.

When uninstalling Booklore, I found that the permissions of my entire e-book library on my Unraid server were set to d--x--x--x, preventing me from moving, copying, or deleting the books at the file system level. This was easily changed, but this "feature" and the public controversy on Reddit confirmed that removing Booklore from my stack was at least the right move for me.