Comment by Towaway69
Comment by Towaway69 a day ago
Didn't their change their licensing or something and now folks are leaving? I've seen a few ex-N8n'ers coming over to the Node-RED forum, hence the question.
Comment by Towaway69 a day ago
Didn't their change their licensing or something and now folks are leaving? I've seen a few ex-N8n'ers coming over to the Node-RED forum, hence the question.
Yet more evidence that venture capital is basically incompatible with open source software. It's just a matter of time before any VC-backed open source company betrays its users.
n8n was never open source. They started out using Apache with a non-free clause added, but they called themselves open-source incorrectly. Then when this became more widely known, they stopped calling themselves open-source.
Why is it okay to just accept that the hyperscalers are 100% closed, but the minute a smaller player tries to play "open-ish" with "fair source" we crucify them?
Fair source is amazing. You get the code. You can modify the code. You can redistribute the code. You just can't take their business from them and compete with them head-to-head with their product. You can reformulate it into something else, but you can't take their labor and cut their knees off with it. You have literally every other freedom.
Why in the hell are so many people against that?
Fair source is sustainable and equitable. You get everything except for that one little right with which you could compete with them.
Everyone gushes over Obsidian - that's not even "source available" or "fair source". It's completely closed.
I bet if Obsidian went "fair source", and you could download the code and compile it yourself, there would be hundreds of voices crawling out of the woodwork to call them the devil for not being pure OSI-approved open. How dare they keep one little freedom to themselves for all the hard work they've done?
I'm half convinced the anti-"fair source" voices are deep industry folks who want big tech to own the OSI definition. Who can use it strategically as they sit atop hundreds of billions of dollars in cash flows. Open source to the FAANGMAGMA Gods is just a way of outsourcing labor and dangling trinkets in front of underpaid labor.
n8n isn't doing a "VC rug pull." They're trying to be sustainable. The only thing that's been "pulled" is the wool over the eyes of every engineer satisfied with FAANG OSI-approved serfdom. Some of the pieces are "open" all right, but they own pretty much everything the sunlight touches.
If n8n can't build a business then it just becomes some side project hobby. What exactly do we think every other company is doing?
Please be more pragmatic and realize that "fair source" is sustainable. It rewards the innovators and you get almost everything for free. You just can't shoot them with their own gun.
Do you not want the ability to download the source and potentially tweak the software? To have a copy you can hold onto forever? To be able to analyze it for telemetry. To be able to potentially submit patches (if you're feeling generous)?
Don't you want them to make money? Rather than beg for Github donation scraps?
Be especially mindful if you're typing a retort on a Macbook Pro or iPhone and deploying software to GKE or AWS.
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I care that software I depend upon survives long term. In consequence, I care to some extent that the principal company or organization building that software also survives... But that finite concern is balanced against the simultaneous concern that the software itself can survive the organization's potential dissolution. I don't want to have to make a sudden, stressful, expensive migration because corporate buy-outs, bankruptcies, or mergers result in rug-pulls for software I use.
"Fair" source does absolutely nothing to allievate those concerns. The four software freedoms do.
It is true that for a quarter century software developers have naively licensed their projects under MIT and BSD style permissive licenses, and have then felt robbed when big companies come in and eat their lunch. Except it was never their lunch because they didn't actually use licenses that would have asserted their rights to that lunch.
Thankfully, that naivete is finally, slowly dying but, rather than use robust solutions that have been around for decades (e.g. GPL-or-AGPL/proprietary dual license), some developers have invented a new, largely untested concept and named it by dressing up their own sour grapes and spite as "fairness".
"Fair" source software is a non-solution in search of a problem.
Free software and strong copyleft licenses already exist. Dual-licensing already exists. Viable, profitable, healthy, ethical companies built on these strategies already exist.
I used to think Stallman was a crank and a fundamentalist, and he absolutely is, and thank goodness for that. I now think "open-source" is exactly as diluted as free software advocates initially pointed out, and the emergence of "fair" source is part of the damage it has done.
I don't know/care about "fair source," but the "open source" label in particular has ALWAYS had a well-known and specific meaning in the software world. Attaching it to a proprietary product for the marketing and social media good feels is actively deceitful, no matter if the company is USA trillion-dollar Big Tech or a single developer from a marginalized demographic in a developing country.
Software authors have the right to choose whatever license they wish for the project/product, just don't try to lie to users about what it really is.
The person I was replying to seemed to be under the impression that n8n used to be open source and now is not. This is not the case, so I pointed that out.
Did you have anything to say about my actual comment, or are you just attaching your rant to a random part of the thread?
> Why is it okay to just accept that the hyperscalers are 100% closed, but the minute a smaller player tries to play "open-ish" with "fair source" we crucify them?
besides morale, from pure business point of view, hyperscalers will likely last, so that's Ok to rely on them, small OSS projects can be supported/modified by community or business itself, but when some small closed source service is gone, it is compete shutdown, you need to migrate to something else in a very big hurry.
this is a solid argument against the open-source purists that I've never heard before and really appreciate. Many people would like to make money on the things they spend their time building. Some percentage of those people also love FOSS. Fair source is the middle ground where they can share their work, open it up for criticism, issues, and fixes, but ensure that their business is secure. It's a solid middle ground that shouldn't be demonized just because it isn't open source.
I was in an org that used windmill. We eventually got off it mostly because the model encourages end users to install arbitrary python packages at runtime from the internet. That might be acceptable for some use cases but not ours
Node red is better (imo) but harder for non technical users to use
What did elasticsearch/redis do so wrong?
AWS and Google stole their only revenue source.
Those guys did all the work and AWS and Google get to collect a cool hundred million each quarter for doing next to nothing. And the original authors can't compete with that.
Are we all gonna go sign up to "Enterprise Redis Cloud" to support them? I don't think so. They have nothing left. They got picked dry.
If they're preserved a "no managed offerings" freedom for themselves, they could collect a few hundred million from each hyperscaler each quarter and put that directly into product. And their engineers would be extra nicely compensated.
But that's not how this story plays out. Big tech just takes things and finds out how to monetize them in ways they don't have to give back.
And we've been trained (by big tech?) to yell at the little guys that try to carve out a space for themselves.
Both are billion dollar companies, we as individuals have nothing in common with them. Enshittification happens due to market conditions that apply to small and large companies alike. Redis and elasticsearch aren't underdogs fighting for the little guy, they are just a smaller scale version of the same shit.
I'd rather have a software commons and have tech be owned by the workers and not soul-sucking corporations, no matter the size.
Node-RED is cool but I didn't realise it could do the AI workflows that n8n is aiming for?
For the AI workflows, we (windmill.dev) added AI Agent steps as first class primitives very recently.
Node-Red is probably a more hands on approach, than n8n, as someone who have 6-7 years of experience in node-red i find n8n really complicated for some reason. A lot of windows and configurations. Started with node-red and quickly built great skills in backend development.
Also utilized Cursor to quickly spinup a OpenRouter nodes for node-red, install node-red and check them out :D https://www.npmjs.com/package/@lizzard-solutions/node-red-co...
Keep to know how people are using it inspite of the licensing issues. Langflow seems good?
Langflow was more painful than a wisdom tooth extraction to use. This was back in early 2025 tho
I would recommend Node-RED but that's a lot more work than a Zapier or N8n but you can do more with it - Node-RED abstraction level is closer to a programming language than a SaaS combinatorial tool.
Depends on what you want to achieve and how much effort you want to apply.
Try activepieces, they never did any bait and switch.
You can also try https://github.com/autokitteh/autokitteh. Python based, completely open source. Got inter workflow storage as well