[arey_abhishek]

I am a co-founder of a competing OSS product called Appsmith. I discovered Superblocks early this year and my first reaction was that the UI builder looks similar to Appsmith. Examined the DOM, and it was Appsmith code under the hood.

I’m new to the FOSS world and it was quite interesting to see someone use our project to compete with us.

[ranma]

(Creator of Superblocks here)

Yes, we do use some Appsmith code (Apache 2.0) in Superblocks specifically related to our frontend drag and drop canvas and components, as part of our UI builder in Superblocks. We’ve evolved our architecture significantly over the past 18 months to support our unique API execution model.

We do not use it in our API builder, workflow builder, scheduled job builder, agent platform, permissions, audit logs, observability, integrations, version control and more, all of which have been built on a different architecture to provide different value to our customers.

What Appsmith has built is impressive and is a good option for customers who may prefer to fork and customize their UI builder or prefer to manage a full on-prem platform themselves. The customers who choose Superblocks are a different group with different needs.

[arey_abhishek]

Thanks for confirming.

[ilaksh]

What is the license you are using?

If your intention is not to allow this, you could switch to AGPL.

[arey_abhishek]

We use the Apache 2.0 license and we don’t intend to change it. AGPL would restrict adoption. We have a few large companies that maintain Appsmith forks customised for their needs. A couple of them have made the product better. Only thing that I’d like is an acknowledgement at this point. An engineer from Superblocks spent hours of my team’s time asking questions about the project on our Discord community. We were too dim to realise that the engineer wasn’t interested in contributing but competing. It’s all perfectly legal, but definitely left a poor taste once we found the product.