This comment got me digging, n8n actually has a pretty good post-open source license[1] - I'm glad to see more successful examples of this sort of licensing in the wild
> subtlying implying that open-source is old and past it
It's really not that deep; U2 and Mogwai exist in the same timeline, in the same shared canon of contemporary music.
> It's a pre-open source license
This statement is strictly ahistorical; the earliest software licenses which made source code available to everyone and included restrictions on redistribution and/or use date back to the late 1990s[1][2].
You can certainly _try_ to make the case that these are the same as the Xerox license, but I don't think it would be a very strong one.
It's great and all that their business strategy is working out, but anyone looking to use a FOSS solution isn't going to care at all.
This is basically just allowing self-hosting of a third-party's cloud, which is an improvement over traditional SaaS, but shouldn't dilute the FOSS label.
This is such a strange thing to post in response to a link which states:
> Although n8n's source code is available under the Sustainable Use License, according to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licenses can't include limitations on use, so we do not call ourselves open source.
I don't think it's strange at all. These licenses obviously have rhetoric reminiscent of FOSS licenses. These companies just don't want to call their technology proprietary.
I'm not sure what else you and others who make these kinds of comments are looking for from projects like these who are already explicitly and clearly stating that they are _not_ FOSS projects
It's as if you don't want source code to be available _at all_ unless it's under a FOSS license
Surely the goal is to ensure that there is no erosion of FOSS as a concept?
The existence and growth of FOSS is something that has happened as a result of considerable advocacy, and while its broad success has become somewhat self-sustaining, there will never not be the risk of a slide into more single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms.
It's not a bad thing to push for "source available" to be considered as not going far enough, and to not let it supplant FOSS through purely pragmatic concerns.
> there will never not be the risk of a slide into more single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms
There is something off about this to me in a world where FOSS exists in it's present form primarily to the outsized benefit of hyperscalers and entrenched incumbents
There was a post on another forum earlier this week on this same broad topic which resonated deeply with me, as someone (who like most of the US population) is a layoff and a medical emergency away from ruin:
> When I started getting interested in open source, I had problems like unreliable software, the inability to inspect or improve it, limited experience with collaborating. Open source solved those, but now my most pressing problem is that the excellent software I use is undermaintained and outright abandoned because the creators can't afford to keep donating time to it. Open source has been a process for solving problems, not the end goal. If it's not capable of solving problems, it's time for new approaches.[1]
As much as I appreciate a good snarky comment, this is a good reminder for contributors to be thoughtful about the licenses under which they contribute code to projects
> Nowhere in any common open license does anyone promise to keep working on their project, much less on particular terms. Any contributor to a permissively-licensed project can license their next contribution however they want. Any steward of a copyleft project with rights to all contributions can, too. Much as you could pick an Apache-licensed project, fork it, and sell your enhanced version under proprietary terms, a project steward can share new work under new terms, as well.
>
> None of this changes the license terms for old releases. Prior versions with MIT or Apache 2 or MPLv2 or what have you in the LICENSE file remain available to use, share, and change under those terms. That includes forking. We see that every time a going-forward relicensing spawns a new one. The reason the new license terms matter for new releases is that those new license terms apply to the diff between the old release and the new one.[1]
Full disclosure, I'm incredibly biased here as I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, but there's a reason I joined them instead of n8n. On the surface they're comparable, but I think Node-RED (and FlowFuse) is a better solution for a lot of reasons:
First off, Node-RED handles real-time event data much, much better in my experience. Because of where Node-RED came from, there's much better support for IoT, MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA, edge protocols, etc. n8n is much more limited in this regard, and the fact that the Node-RED and FlowFuse community has literally thousands of custom nodes makes the calculus pretty clear.
I also think that FlowFuse/Node-RED has better integration of AI workloads. In theory n8n is designed around AI, but it treats it the same way OpenAI's AgentKit does - as sort of opaque connections. FlowFuse/Node-RED instead treats it as an actual message payload (both in terms of how you connect to the APIs and how you interact with what's generated), so instead of throwing your request into the void and hoping for the best, you can control every minute part of the flow.
That also makes for much more transparent debugging and visual data flow - the whole idea of these low-code environments is to give you the same control as high-code without the headache. Abstracting that away too much gives you less control, which is sort of the antithesis of this approach.
I'm not legally biased similarly (work in finance), and I prefer NodeRED. To me, the black box thing is very significant in the feel of using the tool. When I work on a N8N workflow, it feels like I'm chaining gmail filters. Where as NodeRED, I can mentally map that better to what is actually being run, and so feels more like using ComfyUI's custom node capability. I feel like N8N wants to be no-code, where as NodeRED is very much low-code and embraces that, which I find to be the right balance for me for control vs convenience.
Yeah, exactly! What's so funny to me is that people who think they want no-code really don't want no-code. Because no-code is built for that - but even novices in coding will really quickly outstrip a no-code native environment, whereas low-code will scale with your learning,
No-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "I wish I had access to literally any code system to make this work."
Low-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "Oh awesome I can actually use code here!"
Open source does mean source available to many people, especially the non-programmer lay-public, no matter how much OSI and people who adopt OSI’s definition dislike it, c.f. the dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source
(And BTW I like OSI’s definition!)
Instead of claiming the words “open source” always mean OSI’s definition, it’d be better to clarify up front that you’re talking about OSI’s “Open Source Definition”, which is (effectively) a trademark or term of art and does not preempt all possible definitions of the phrase. (Special note that the words “open source” do not always refer to code.)
The turf battle over the words free and open seems silly to me, with both sides arguing that the other side’s word literally means something other than they intend. Stallman has argued that open means source available, and OSI has argued that free means price. Both sides are right, and both sides are stubborn too.
I would argue completely the opposite, and that we actually have a very clear set of descriptors available to us, each of which is a subset of the following ones:
Yes we have clear & good descriptors available. I wasn’t arguing against those. I was simply pointing out that those aren’t the only definitions of the words free & open, which is a fact. It’s a fact that FSF and OSI have both used in their own arguments! I’m slightly surprised by the pushback and downvotes (which probably means I didn’t state things clearly or come off how I intended). OSI’s definition is logical today but took a long time to develop. It’s one of those things that’s hard to imagine never having heard, but if you had never heard it, you almost certainly wouldn’t jump to OSI’s definition upon hearing “open source” the first time. The lay public generally doesn’t either, and don’t know about licenses and the software community’s terms of art.
Source available but you can't use it professionally or commercially doesn't feel open source at all to me, and I disapprove of trying to weasel word around that.
Rather than clarify confusion & raise a real and important distinction, this post carries water for obfuscation and confusion: if people aren't clear the answer isn't to loosen the definition, it's to make the distinction clearer.
Non-programmers and the lay public do not assume what source available means, nor what open source means, in terms of what you can and can’t do with it. Most lay people would assume that if source is available, then you can do what you want with it. This is what a lot of programmers assumed before OSI and FSF existed. Saying that many people think these two terms (open source, and source available) mean the same thing does not imply that anyone is suggesting that you can’t use code professionally or commercially. It’s a negative assumption on your part to accuse people of weaseling just because they don’t know your industry term of art definition.
Honestly, I never heard of people being confused about open source like this. Either you know about open source and then you know exactly what it means, or you know nothing about it at all. At least, that has been my experience. Open source, FOSS and source available are quite well defined and their definitions commonly known amongst anyone with even the slightest clue about software licenses.
If you clone the Windmill source from GitHub and build it, that’s AGPL.
If you enable the enterprise feature flag or use the Docker image, the result is source available.
I think it’s fair to call Windmill open source. It’s using the open core model for commercialisation. Just because you publish open source it doesn’t obligate you to make all the code you write open source.
