Comment by JimDabell 19 hours ago
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.
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.
Authors using Fair want to share their code while getting protections for themselves. Strong copyleft doesn't care about authors and is all about protecting the end users.
So Fair fullfills an actual need or desire not covered elsewhere, thus is not a non-solution.
It might be not the appropriate or the best solution to solve the exact concerns of people using it, that's debatable and a different topic, akin to using the wrong tool for the job. Strong copyleft is the wrong tool, too; obviously competitors can just deploy without modifications and offer it as a service.
> Authors using Fair want to share their code while getting protections for themselves. Strong copyleft doesn't care about authors and is all about protecting the end users.
This is a one-sided assertion of fairness, and therefore an abuse of the concept. Free software offers the same rights to both authors and users. That is fairness.
If you want to reserve rights to yourself that are withheld from end-users, that's fine. Arguably even still within a broader conceptual realm of fairness. But naming your personally preferred arrangement of rights "fair" and in so doing implying most or all other arrangements are unfair is just plain arrogant.
Strong copyleft cares equally about authors and end-users. It doesn't disregard authors. Some authors just want to co-opt the general notion of fairness to mean their own licensing preferences.
Call it a non-compete license and be forthright.
Allow me to try a analogy.
You and sfRattan rightfully pointing to a disease (large cloud providers using true free software to make money without contributing back). But "fair source" cure is a new, unproven drug with serious side effects, all while ignoring the established, effective vaccine (strong copyleft GPL/AGPL and dual-licensing), that has been available for decades. The rise of "fair source" is both as sign of "market panic" and just "marketing". It does not seem to be necessary or good evolution for software freedom.
That was HIGHLY abstract... So much so that I am not sure it maps onto reality, but I at least think this is a valid concern.
> But "fair source" cure is a new, unproven drug with serious side effects, all while ignoring the established, effective vaccine (strong copyleft GPL/AGPL and dual-licensing)
Can you explain this a bit more? I don't understand how this is true.
AFAIK AGPL only prevents someone from modifying your AGPL codebase without sharing that in turn, but if they're content to offer exactly the service you're offering without modification it's not an issue.
See for example Grafana, which is distributed under the AGPL but still has to handle competition from AWS and Azure that have managed Grafana offerings.
> I care that software I depend upon survives long term.
> "Fair" source does absolutely nothing to allievate those concerns.
I'm all in favor of free software, but it sounds a bit disingenuous to pretend that the GPL or even, to a lesser extent, the Affero variant, are providing a safe haven for sustainable software. The reality is, sadly, that free software depends on the good will of very few idealistic people who manage to somehow make a living while spending a lot of time on working for free ; and i must know since I've been lucky to be able to do this most of my life. This is no guaranteed survival or innovation.
While I believe it's very useful to remind users of the freedom they should ask for, I don't think it's useful to oppose free software with fair source, exactly like in the past it was important to remind users of the differences between free software and open source, yet it was counter productive to oppose them.
> Git clone, problem solved.
What a myopic assumption. Availability of source code doesn't solve the legal problems that can arise in the wake corporate restructuring, as new owners work to impede forking and continuing a project outside their control.
Continuing a project in the wake of total organizational failure or capture means setting up legal entities to replace the broken/subverted ones. That's a problem separate from "is the code out there on the Internet for me to download?"
In comparison to the GPL and AGPL, "fair" source licenses are at best hastily drawn. They certainly do not have decades of accrued favorable legal precedent. They are often short and ambiguous because their authors have not imagined half the use cases they might potentially forbid in the name of "fairness". All these qualities are miasmal to long term project stability.
Are you me? That was so scarily close to how I think about this that I could have thought I wrote it myself. Except you know a more about licenses :P Well written. Thanks.
Edit: I would also add that, based on the specific software/business, the problem with "rug-pulling," as described by another user here, is a real thing. I think that the reason Obsidian doesn't get hate, while being closed source, is that they are at least predictable and honest about their strategy. Their pricing is fair, and development and business plans are openly communicated. It's silly to be angry at a firm for wanting to be closed source, but if they start out pretending to be fully open source and community-motivated, while receiving lots of coding contributions, then suddenly do a rug-pull by removing features from the community edition and paywalling all important features, that is something a lot of us are going to be annoyed by.
You're welcome! :)
> It's silly to be angry at a firm for wanting to be closed source, but if they start out pretending to be fully open source and community-motivated, while receiving lots of coding contributions, then suddenly do a rug-pull by removing features from the community edition and paywalling all important features, that is something a lot of us are going to be annoyed by.
Indeed, and that is why assessing the long term viability of an open-source or free software project means looking at multiple variables. This thread has mostly been about licenses, but there's also literal distribution of ownership... Both ownership of copyright and of corporation.
Is the code's copyright owned by the company and does the company only accept contributions with a contributor license agreement that transfers copyright to itself? Potential red flag. They're keeping the door open for an attempt to rug-pull, but they also might just be trying to do business via dual licensing.
Is the code's copyright owned by too many people to ever feasibly relicense? Green flag, as long as a healthy foundation exists to keep things on track (e.g. Blender Foundation or The Document Foundation).
Is the company publicly traded or has it accepted large amounts of investment? Red flag. Those investors will demand a rug-pull the moment the lines on their sacred monthly and quarterly graphs stop going up.
Is the company closely held by a few people? Potential green flag, depending on the people.
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.
"Open" AI, "Open" Router, and the like typically get a pass.
n8n has never called themselves "open". Their first commit:
https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/9cb9804eeec1576d935817ecd...
There's so much misinformation and animosity about fair source licenses.
> n8n has never called themselves "open"
Trivially debunked by looking at their homepage in 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20191009000026/https://n8n.io/
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?
Quoting another poster (wavemode) here...
Trivially debunked by looking at their homepage in 2019:
That archived page doesn’t debunk what I am saying, it supports it.
> Open Source Alternative for Zapier/tray.io
They claimed to be open source…
> (Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause)
…but they were not. The Commons Clause means that it isn’t open source. It’s a commercial restriction.
The founder directly said this when discussing it here, the day before that archive was saved:
> > This is not open source - it is source available.
> Yes you are correct. Wrote an extra section about it here in the docs: https://docs.n8n.io/#/faq?id=license
> 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.
that list is catchy, but if you dig into details, there are many caveats, for example many product were not killed, but replaced with low friction, for example hangout, many products were created at period of time when there was that google labs which launched many strange low quality products which never gained traction.
If you check some core business products (ads, cloud), google usually provides reasonable deprecation timeframe (years).
True that google never depleted us from messaging apps; at some point they had 3 different in operation, with contradictory statements about which one was made obsolete by some other.
Which also illustrate that a stable business does not imply a stable product.
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.
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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https://faircode.io/
https://fair.io/