Hacker News Reader

Comment by sqs | Hacker News Reader

Sourcegraph CEO here. Fair Source is not an open-source license. It is intended to be an improvement over closed source (GitHub, Bitbucket, etc.) and open core (where many important bits are closed source). Fair Source is not intended to support forking and independent redistribution. If you fork a Fair Source-licensed project and try to distribute it, users would have to also acquire a license from the original author.

View on HN

According to fair.io:

> Fair Source License functions just like an open-source license

with the only restriction being that I can't use it with over X employees in my company.

If what you're saying is true then I'd highly suggest you reword that, in reality it functions just like a proprietary license except that I can look at the source and maybe send patches to you.

More similar to that of the proprietary JIRA (which will give you source when you buy it) than the open source Gitlab.

I mentioned this over on lobste.rs, but I'll mention it here in brief: fair.io does a really bad job of stating this intent. The elevator pitch mentions open source but not proprietary. Please consider rewording fair.io to be clearer about the non-open-source intent here.

Thanks for this suggestion. We want to make it clear that Fair Source is not Open Source. We've updated the summary in the header: https://fair.io. Hope this is clearer!

You still make the false claim that "The Fair Source License works just like an open-source license when the usage is below the Use Limitation."

Fair Source never works like an Open Source license. It works like (because it is) a source-available proprietary license which allows local (but not redistributed) modifications. Below the use limitation, it is also a free-of-cost license. But it never works like an Open Source license, and it doesn't even work more like an Open Source license below the Use Limitation.

I was a bit confused at first, but this explanation makes a lot of sense. Please put it somewhere prominent on the Fair Source page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com