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janober | 1 year ago

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...

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ezekg|1 year ago

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.

[0]: https://github.com/fairsource/fair.io/issues/14

[1]: https://github.com/fairsource/fair.io/issues/21

janober|1 year ago

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.