Definitely, no stars have been bought, and none will ever be. It would go literally against everything we stand for and one of our core values, "Act with Integrity".
Also love my roast:
Oh, look at Mr. 'I automate everything' over here! You're so obsessed with workflow automation, I bet you've tried to create an n8n node to brush your teeth. Your GitHub feed is like a 'Who's Who' of hipster tech - self-hosted this, open-source that. I'm surprised you haven't tried to replace your coffee machine with a Rust-based, AI-driven, blockchain-powered pour-over system yet. And let's talk about your love for PDF manipulation - nothing says 'I'm a fun developer' like spending your free time merging documents. At least with all these monitoring tools you follow, you'll be the first to know when your over-engineered home automation system inevitably becomes sentient and locks you out of your own house!
Honestly generally love it. Not surprising, after all, are we at n8n Fair Code licensed ourselves(not to be confused with Fair Source). I would, however, really love it if it ended up being more inclusive and so in a joint effort rather than a divided one. More information about why we did not join here:
https://medium.com/@faircode/n8n-commits-to-fair-code-6b8923...
I wish you would have been more involved in the discussions [0] [1] leading up to this. I know you were invited to participate, since Chad shared your thoughts a few times via proxy. Regarding your main points:
1. I'm on the governance 'board' for Fair Source, and I am not associated with Sentry. All it took was involvement and deeply caring about the subject (which I know you do).
2a. The requirement for delayed Open Source publication (DOSP) could have been discussed further if there was more involvement from other non-DOSP companies other than me (before I relicensed from ELv2 to FCL). I advocated for ELv2 to be considered Fair Source, but nobody else advocated with me, and I ended up abandoning it for the FCL. I was looking forward to you discussing SUL and how it was a good fit for Fair Source, but you never did.
2b. The lack of options for self-hosted monetization (e.g. EE/CE offerings) is no longer a problem for Fair Source under the Fair Core License [0], which I drafted alongside Heather Meeker (who helped draft FSL and ELv2) to solve the problem of self-hosted monetization under the FSL or BUSL.
With that said, I think where we landed i.r.t. requiring DOSP makes sense as a differentiation vs open core and "source-available." I was originally vocally against Fair Source requiring DOSP, but the lack of involvement from other companies using ELv2, SSPL, and SUL, made the decision a little bit easier.
Yes, I totally agree that I should have been more involved in hindsight, and that is definitely on me! In the first conversation with Chad, we actually agreed on chatting again after a few weeks regarding the next steps, but that never happened. The next time I heard about it was a few weeks before the launch (and yes, for sure, also partly on me!).
When I heard from Chad, DOSP was also still optional. The only issue I had was about governance. That sadly changed around one week later, and it became a hard requirement, even though I made very clear that it would be a deal breaker. So, I would say I was at least involved there, but it did not really matter. Worrying about something like that was interestingly also why governance was so important to me. I expected it to become a problem sometime later but was surprised that it was already a problem before it really started.
Our original conversation was also more about what to move forward with, fair code or source, and should be more like a joint effort (at least how it sounded to me). I was, however, very honest about it, saying that my time was limited at that time, and so I am happy he takes the lead. Maybe that is where it partly broke down, and we understood something very different.
Regarding differentiation: Honestly, I do not think the difference between "fair source" vs "open core" vs "source available" is what matters. What matters is the differentiation vs open source.
We had some pretty detailed discussion that you missed out on: https://github.com/fairsource/fair.io/issues/14#issuecomment.... I'm sure SUL would have been right there with ELv2 since it's derived from it. I wish you would have participated. I ultimately relented because I relicensed to the FCL (because I wanted an ELv2 that was DOSP).
Ultimately, DOSP is a good thing and I want to see more companies adopt it under Fair Source.
fyi, a separate account should not be necessary any more as the functionality got integrated into the regular version and is so available for all users by default.
Totally understandable. We have however basic user management in n8n for quite a while already and it is available for free. Since the beginning of the year we also have built collaboration, that is however a paid feature.
Docker is actually not a requirement. You can also run it directly with npm. You can even start it for testing (when you have npm installed) simply by typing "npx n8n".
Source available does sadly not really mean that much. Just means the source code is available. MIT licensed code and code you can see but are not allowed to use can be described as source available. That is what https://faircode.io/ got created for to solve.
Ah yes, that is what we did in the end for the database. But that is not our main issue, rather that we do not get any more instances for our k8s cluster and those we can sadly not just spin up somewhere else.
