@jan You write that the new license is “more permissive”. The opposite seems to be the case. The new license is actually LESS permissive.
The former license was Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause. With this license, we were able to provide a hosted version of n8n as an additional service to the customers of our main product, as long as we didn’t charge them an extra for this.
The official website of the Commons Clause license states this clearly:
[…] you may embed and redistribute Commons Clause software in a larger product, and you may distribute and even “sell” (which includes offering as a commercial SaaS service) your product.
The new license clearly prohibits this by limiting any redistribution or hosting to “non-commercial” purposes:
You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
Through enforcing this new license you are effectively killing any real competition to your own SaaS offering (and not just of your embed offering) by forcing competitors into a licensing agreement (and we saw that license before and we were not happy with it).
It also creates an uneven playing field. Any competitor to your own cloud offering has higher costs than you because they have to submit parts of their revenue to you. This is similar to the situation with Apple and their app store monopoly. It is also hard to compete there with Apple’s own apps because any competitor has to deliver a cut to Apple while apple is not paying these fees for their own apps.
This is bad for the n8n ecosystem in our opinion because it hinders competition and makes it less attractive for external developers like us to contribute. And there are many examples of ecosystems that thrive when there is real open source involved, like WordPress, Mautic, Matomo, Metabase or Cal. com.
It’s sad that n8n wants to take a different route.