This is cool and in some world where the company becomes massive and basically commit to properly maintaining the product I could see it being a player.
I'm skeptical of open-sourcing UI and workflow builders.
The upsides are that you enable a community to build connectors and the UI builder + maintain them, but the downside is that you have to manage the community well enough that enterprises can trust the connectors and the UI builder. The challenge of maintaining the community + maintaining some sort of an SLA is very hard. This type of software is extremely hard to test for –writing integration tests are much harder for the frontend than they are for something like a database (e.g. MongoDB) because of the permutations of use-cases). The OSS+managed model seems to have succeeded in areas where very you can regression tests are much easier to maintain and there are clear benchmarks to test the community's output against.
As a buyer (we recently bought SuperBlocks (https://www.superblocks.com/) which is just a managed version of the same idea) it's hard to commit to an open-source version of something like this given the problems above. I may be totally wrong – I've never run an OSS+managed business, and as much as I love the ethos, I still have to not care about the stability of an internal tool builder that my company is being built on top of.
You have a good point about enterprise requirements and the challenge of wrapping an SLA around open source which is entirely or primarily made from community contributions. I ran into this all the time when I worked at Acquia which provides a platform for Drupal.
One thing to note - proprietary does not necessarily mean it is any safer or more stable than OSS. Superblocks is actually a closed source fork of Appsmith, so the code is very close to the open source version, but now it is not visible.
In my experience, proprietary vs OSS is not the issue, but maturity and support.
Most newer software either has undiscovered bugs, or develops them as they grow and become complex. More mature software tends to be more stable in general, and OSS projects with commercial backing tend to have the resources (and incentive) to focus on security and stability.
This is why I am so interested in the explosion of Open Source business models. In theory, it provides a more stable product and commercial support, while still being transparent about its code and being open to community contributions.
I'm skeptical of open-sourcing UI and workflow builders.
The upsides are that you enable a community to build connectors and the UI builder + maintain them, but the downside is that you have to manage the community well enough that enterprises can trust the connectors and the UI builder. The challenge of maintaining the community + maintaining some sort of an SLA is very hard. This type of software is extremely hard to test for –writing integration tests are much harder for the frontend than they are for something like a database (e.g. MongoDB) because of the permutations of use-cases). The OSS+managed model seems to have succeeded in areas where very you can regression tests are much easier to maintain and there are clear benchmarks to test the community's output against.
As a buyer (we recently bought SuperBlocks (https://www.superblocks.com/) which is just a managed version of the same idea) it's hard to commit to an open-source version of something like this given the problems above. I may be totally wrong – I've never run an OSS+managed business, and as much as I love the ethos, I still have to not care about the stability of an internal tool builder that my company is being built on top of.