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Okay explain to how forking would work with this license. Forking a project is a huge part of creating a OSS community. Would licensing have to go to both parties? I don't see any explanation of how it would work for this license.

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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.

This doesn't sound like an improvement to me. It actually takes (just another) SaaS product, and makes it feel like it intentionally does a disservice to it's users.

AFAIK this is similar to how Microsoft licenses Windows: you get the product, and source is available on request (and an NDA [and perhaps only to select customers]). In this case the fee for source access is waived, and in place of an NDA is the spectre of patent and copyright lawsuits. But essentially the licence is similar, the pricing is different?

Makes me a bit sad in the wake of MS liberating a lot of stuff lately, like Visual Studio.

Of course not many other companies have the benefit of collecting an OS tax on hardware - I still think I'd prefer eg the AGPL to this.

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