Right, you can run it yourself or pay n8n to run it. For purists the language matters, realistically for users it does not. You’re not locked into the SaaS platform is the point.
I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it? Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)?
> I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it?
Yes, we wanted our customers to be able to set up integrations themselves. We didn’t care about white labelling it, we just needed to a) modify it, b) self-host it, and c) use it commercially. Something that open source is ideal for.
> Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)?
Yes but that means absolutely nothing if you don’t have the budget for it, or even if you do have the budget for it but there are more valuable things for your developers to work on, or if you do have the budget for it but it isn’t worth that much. In our case the value provided by n8n wasn’t anywhere near $50k/yr. And, more to the point, $50k/yr is $50k/yr more expensive than open source. It would have been worth using if it had been open source, but it wasn’t worth using at that price.
Right, so it prevented freeloading. It’s working as intended. Still usable for those who want to eject from the hosted platform, but if you make money from it, n8n should get paid for that value. You’ve proved the point of why open source would’ve been a suboptimal license for them to use.
Open source was intended as free as in speech, not free as in beer. “Open source because I don’t want to pay something” is…not great.
> if you make money from it, n8n should get paid for that value.
We weren’t really expecting to make any money out of it. We already have a Zapier integration that our customers were using. We just wanted things to be a little bit easier for our customers. Does this have an indirect impact on our profits? Sure, I guess marginally. Enough to justify a $50k/yr license fee? Nope, not even remotely close. Our customers can carry on using Zapier.
> You’ve proved the point of why open source would’ve been a suboptimal license for them to use.
They didn’t get paid either way, the only difference was we send all our customers to their competitor now. Which also isn’t open source, of course, but Zapier has the brand recognition and reach n8n doesn’t. Everybody knows Zapier, a lot of customers ask for it specifically. Nobody asks for n8n. I don’t want to make the “you’ll get paid in exposure” argument, but in practical terms, the only difference to n8n in our particular case was they had a chance to stop us sending customers to Zapier. They never had the opportunity to earn money from us directly, only to get us to stop sending customers to their competitor.
If n8n want to license their product in that way, that’s up to them. It’s totally their right to do so. But it’s not open source and this is a big issue for some potential users here. Discussion about that belongs here, especially when people are saying that it’s open source.
> Open source was intended as free as in speech, not free as in beer.
You’ve misunderstood that. Open source and Free Software includes both. Open source was originally promoted as the commercially-attractive alternative to Free Software.
>Is a person that uses Linux or FreeBSD without paying for it also a 'freeloader'?
A few times? No. All the time, without ever giving back? Yes. It's the truth.
It's not about money specifically, it's about contributing to the open-source movement in general. This movement is why desktop and server computing is as open as it is and we're not all renting our dev tools and OSes for a monthly fee to one of the dystopian tech giants.
It's like if you joined a commune where they provide you with a room and meals at no cost. They tell you you can stay as long as you want. If you're still there after 2 years, you don't think you oughta give something back?