Noco Founder Here : coming from reddit and leaving the same message
Hey everybody, Thank you for bringing this up.
When we began this journey at noco, we held a simple belief: that a powerful spreadsheet database should be accessible to every single internet business. Today, more than 25,000 organizations rely on NocoDB completely freely with full collaboration, with role-based permissions, and row level audit logs. We are so deeply grateful for this opportunity to serve our community.
But I must speak plainly about a difficult truth. The open source covenant depends upon mutual respect, that those who benefit from shared work will honour the terms under which it is given. Increasingly, this covenant is being broken every month. Bad actors take our work and sell it as their own, with no intention of complying with AGPLv3. Our engineers have been consulted innumerable times now to help on what appear to be private forks, where code that should be open remains hidden. The approach itself has been so maligned that they withheld that its a private fork until the last moment. And it is not only small players. Companies with significant resources, backed by reputable investors, have chosen this path too. We have prompted them about the license. It has been of no use. With the advent of coding LLMs, exploitation no longer requires any technical skill for a repo. It requires only bad intention. The burden of proving, fighting, and funding that battle falls entirely upon us. Lawyers cost insane amount of $/hour. We are a small team counting every hour, facing adversaries who count on our inability to pursue them.
We do not wish to fight. We wish to build. And so, like n8n before us, who have flourished to 170,000 stars under Fair Code, we choose a path that lets us be more generous to those who use our work honestly, while simply refusing to cooperate with a system that rewards those who do not. You may have already noticed: with v0.301, we gave away several enterprise features freely. We make this move so we can give you more, not less.
As announced in the release note[1] : we've started to give more to community edition. Webhooks customisation, group by aggregations.
[1] : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/releases/tag/0.301.0
