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The Fair Source license is an interesting innovation. Will individuals within large companies try out Fair Source software like they do open source software? Wi
by achou 11y ago
The Fair Source license is an interesting innovation. Will individuals within large companies try out Fair Source software like they do open source software? Will teams adopt it without knowing whether there are other users at the company, opening themselves to violating the license terms? Will anyone look at the source in depth and contribute back?
I’m all for (ethical) innovations that enable companies to be built more efficiently... Ideology aside, it’s often practical matters that attract users and developers to open source software. They've chosen a different point along in the “how much to give away and under what restrictions” space to try out.
Thoughtful experimentation = good. That doesn't mean it will succeed. But failing to try new things will lead to less efficient innovation in the long run for our industry.
- davexunit 11y ago>it’s often practical matters that attract users and developers to open source software. But the (un)Fair Source License is not an Open Source license.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> A glance at fair.io shows an interesting attempt to provide OSS under a proprietary model. I'm not sure that that is the case: its clearly not Free, but it might be that rare example of a license that meets the OSI Open Source definition but not the FSF Free Software definition. (It clearly violates the spirit of Open Source, and if OSI were to review it, the Open Source definition might be explicitly amended to preclude the kind of use limitation it imposes.)
- davexunit 11y agoI can't speak for the OSI, but this seems in clear violation of the Open Source definition. I'll await their word.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> I can't speak for the OSI, but this seems in clear violation of the Open Source definition. The only part of the definition that seems to be close to being violated is criteria 7 on license distribution (since the license is not sublicensable, but allows redistribution), but since the license from the original copyright holder applies to every recipient of the software, including recipients by redistribution, it seems to be met. EDIT: Actually, I think I may have misread; its not clear that the "Fair Source License" allows redistribution of modified versions (it allows modification and redistribution, but not clearly distribution of modified versions. So that would be fatal.)
- richardfontana 11y agoI am an OSI board director. Generally the OSI does not comment on licenses that have not been submitted for approval. FWIW, I reviewed the license and I agree that it is clearly inconsistent with the Open Source Definition (and with generally accepted notions of what free software and open source licenses are).
- sqs 11y agoSourcegraph CEO here. Just in case there's any confusion, Fair Source is not intended to be OSI compliant, so I would not be surprised if it does not meet their criteria.
- ultramancool 11y agoYou might have a look at my discussion with the CEO here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622760 It seems they've completely prohibited forks effectively by prohibiting redistribution of modified versions. I'm not sure about the OSI definitions, but that definitely doesn't fit with any idea of open source I have at least. At best, I view it as a proprietary product, their source release is no more useful than say, JIRA's. At worst, it seems strangely dishonest to try to promote your product as open source using this sort of license but twist it so far that it doesn't resemble open source at all.
- siegecraft 11y agoI was about to congratulate the CEO for at least being honest about it not being an open source license and castigate the Fair Source License people for deceptively advertising it as open source until I saw that the fair source license was created by sourcegraph, so.. yeah.