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
That's a terrible reimagining, subtlying implying that open-source is old and past it.
It's a pre-open source license. They've not quite made the bar.
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.
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.
It's as if you don't want source code to be available _at all_ unless it's under a FOSS license
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 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]
Not exactly the fault of n8n, but the confusion is there to clear up. That is all I'm reading into it.
They did start out by incorrectly calling themselves open-source, but to their credit they stopped doing that and have been very clear ever since.
> 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]
[1]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/09/23/Two-Kinds-Relicens...