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I think it’s a great idea, but I’d love to see a little bit more consideration around labeling one’s licensing scheme as the “fair” one. Intuitively: if I name

I think it’s a great idea, but I’d love to see a little bit more consideration around labeling one’s licensing scheme as the “fair” one. Intuitively: if I named my political party “the party without stinky feet,” it’s clear that I’m indirectly saying that other parties do have stinky feet. In a similar manner, labeling yourself the “fair” one indirectly suggests that other licensing schemes, including OSS ones, are somehow unfair.

LoganDark 2y ago
Open-source licenses absolutely can be unfair. If a company takes your MIT-licensed software and builds a huge enterprise on it and gives you none of the money? That's unfair for you. But with closed-source software, it's unfair for everyone who uses it. So imagine if there were some sort of middle ground. (I'm not currently aware of a good one, lol) I'm not talking about if someone uses left-pad as part of a billion LOC project, but more like if a company builds its entire stack on top of something like, say, ffmpeg, or ImageMagick, and the original devs never see even a smidgeon of thanks.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  Sure, I wouldn't describe that as fair. But that's my point: OSS licenses don't use phrases like "fair": they talk concretely in terms of rights and guarantees, and they leave it up to both parties to determine whether those rights and guarantees are what they want. I think this can be fair. But I would love to have seen that communicated as "we wrote the license to address the problem of fairness in corporate usage of OSS," not "this is a/the fair license." The latter is a value judgment that isn't universalizable.
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    I read it at first like the usage of fair was as in quantity, as in a middle ground between fully closed and fully open. But calling it a "medium source license" would probably sound weirder than "fair source".
    - woodruffw 2y ago
      King Solomon has a thing or two to say about middle grounds :-)[1] (I agree that "medium source" sounds very weird. Maybe they could have called it the "Availability License" or something similar to emphasize that this is about finding a sweet spot between monetization rights and exposing the source code to the public eye. I don't think that would carry the same baggage as "fair," but it also certainly doesn't have the same marketing flair to it.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon
      - LoganDark 2y ago
        Availability License would probably sound too similar to "source-available" which is often implied to be a lot more restrictive than this model seems to be.
- ThrowawayR2 2y ago
  Use without compensation is what an author intentionally signed up for by choosing the MIT license or other FOSS licenses. The marketers are trying to sell this as "unfair", "predatory", etc., as if the authors were too ignorant to understand the implications of their own license choice. It is perfectly fine to choose Fair Source as a license; that's the prerogative of whoever is writing the code. But don't let these people marketing Fair Source circulate the idea that FOSS licensing is "unfair". It's just another sleazy tactic they're trying after their attempt to redefine open source to include their proprietary Fair Source licensing got rebuffed by the community.
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    Okay, fine, open source licenses aren't unfair on their own, but making your project open-source can put you in unfair situations. That better? Now look, I can understand the argument that one should have known what they were signing up for, but so many people just do not consider what they are signing up for, or even do but think that the worst case situation is unlikely, but later find it happening and that they don't actually entirely not care.
    - ThrowawayR2 2y ago
      I'm sorry but I don't buy that. The arguments between Free Software licenses, open source licenses, proprietary licenses in in all their myriad flavors have been raging in hacker and startup circles for literally decades now. GPL 2 is 33 years old(!). A developer would have to have been living under a rock to be unaware that their license choice directly impacts their ability to monetize their code and, even if they were that negligent, whoever was funding their startup would have warned them.
      - LoganDark 2y ago
        > A developer would have to have been living under a rock to be unaware that their license choice directly impacts their ability to monetize their code That's basically exactly what I'm trying to point out though. Many developers make the determination that they don't want or need to monetize their code. Then someone else does it and then they feel it is unfair. I consider this a perfectly valid way to feel and I don't really consider it a skill issue at the time of choosing the license.

LoganDark 2y ago

Open-source licenses absolutely can be unfair. If a company takes your MIT-licensed software and builds a huge enterprise on it and gives you none of the money? That's unfair for you. But with closed-source software, it's unfair for everyone who uses it. So imagine if there were some sort of middle ground. (I'm not currently aware of a good one, lol) I'm not talking about if someone uses left-pad as part of a billion LOC project, but more like if a company builds its entire stack on top of something like, say, ffmpeg, or ImageMagick, and the original devs never see even a smidgeon of thanks.

woodruffw 2y ago
Sure, I wouldn't describe that as fair. But that's my point: OSS licenses don't use phrases like "fair": they talk concretely in terms of rights and guarantees, and they leave it up to both parties to determine whether those rights and guarantees are what they want. I think this can be fair. But I would love to have seen that communicated as "we wrote the license to address the problem of fairness in corporate usage of OSS," not "this is a/the fair license." The latter is a value judgment that isn't universalizable.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  I read it at first like the usage of fair was as in quantity, as in a middle ground between fully closed and fully open. But calling it a "medium source license" would probably sound weirder than "fair source".
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    King Solomon has a thing or two to say about middle grounds :-)[1] (I agree that "medium source" sounds very weird. Maybe they could have called it the "Availability License" or something similar to emphasize that this is about finding a sweet spot between monetization rights and exposing the source code to the public eye. I don't think that would carry the same baggage as "fair," but it also certainly doesn't have the same marketing flair to it.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      Availability License would probably sound too similar to "source-available" which is often implied to be a lot more restrictive than this model seems to be.
ThrowawayR2 2y ago
Use without compensation is what an author intentionally signed up for by choosing the MIT license or other FOSS licenses. The marketers are trying to sell this as "unfair", "predatory", etc., as if the authors were too ignorant to understand the implications of their own license choice. It is perfectly fine to choose Fair Source as a license; that's the prerogative of whoever is writing the code. But don't let these people marketing Fair Source circulate the idea that FOSS licensing is "unfair". It's just another sleazy tactic they're trying after their attempt to redefine open source to include their proprietary Fair Source licensing got rebuffed by the community.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  Okay, fine, open source licenses aren't unfair on their own, but making your project open-source can put you in unfair situations. That better? Now look, I can understand the argument that one should have known what they were signing up for, but so many people just do not consider what they are signing up for, or even do but think that the worst case situation is unlikely, but later find it happening and that they don't actually entirely not care.
  - ThrowawayR2 2y ago
    I'm sorry but I don't buy that. The arguments between Free Software licenses, open source licenses, proprietary licenses in in all their myriad flavors have been raging in hacker and startup circles for literally decades now. GPL 2 is 33 years old(!). A developer would have to have been living under a rock to be unaware that their license choice directly impacts their ability to monetize their code and, even if they were that negligent, whoever was funding their startup would have warned them.
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      > A developer would have to have been living under a rock to be unaware that their license choice directly impacts their ability to monetize their code That's basically exactly what I'm trying to point out though. Many developers make the determination that they don't want or need to monetize their code. Then someone else does it and then they feel it is unfair. I consider this a perfectly valid way to feel and I don't really consider it a skill issue at the time of choosing the license.