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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

> Oh, it's open (core) source. And while certain (just a couple of) enterprise features should have been made open to qualify as being called open source, it's very close to that.

It is absolutely not open source.

The "Fair Source" license that n8n invented has two related qualifications that make it not open source:

> You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.

It's not open source if you can't use it professionally or sell work derived from it [ed: comments have correctly called out that this is not the deal, thank you]. There's no chance this license or anything like it is ever going to be an OSI approved open source license. https://opensource.org/licenses

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Source Available would be a better descriptor, and with its prevalence in game dev I’m surprised it’s not more commonly used in the broader tech community.

Yeah, it's the proper standard term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

I also find it weird how little use it gets. Possibly a side-effect of true open source having been more popular to the point of source available being historically unknown.

"Internal business purposes" can be professional right? Not saying its an open source license as defined by OSI, just that this license permits the most likely professional use (internal automation).

> It's not open source if you can't use it professionally or sell work derived from it.

Does anyone _really_ use these low/no-code platforms to create products? I was always under the impression that you'd primarily use something like this for "internal business purposes" i.e. little internal utilities that you can't justify spending serious development time on. Which the license lets you do.

I would’ve. We are rolling out one solution instead due to this.

This reminds me of a wonderful definition of ownership: You only own something if you can buy and sell it. See: Kindle books/movies "bought" on Apple TV/etc.

Does n8n have an app store for such products?

Apparently there is a total market of Ableton addons[1] (for example) sold on separate markets. I would call such addons (or packs) "low code".

So there is definitely a potential market for "add ons". But does n8n a) support that and b) encourage such markets for money?

[1] https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/

n8n reddit is overrun with get rich quick workflows.

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