Comment by ultramancool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ultramancool | Hacker News Reader

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I really do not like this license, it prevents usage with other licensing models near completely. Say I want to integrate their code intelligence into gitlab community (MIT licensed), I'm shit out of luck, even if I were to create a relicensed version of gitlab under the Sourcegraph license, it seems as though it'd be unclear who gets what fees and who counts as a "user" in this case. Would it force me as a devleoper who just wants to make something cool to deal with licensing costs? Would I have to be a middleman between Sourcegraph and enterprise customers? Could I say no enterprise customers, too bad, I don't want to deal with it?

What if I, as an individual, fork the project to add some breaking features that not all users may want? Who gets the money from those corporate licensors? Am I even allowed to do so? The fair.io site doesn't make it clear and based on what they do say, I'd be extremely hesitant to make anything more than casual use of software under this license.

It seems to me, based on the information on fair.io that I can simply fork the project, offer enterprise licenses for $0.01, or heck, make a fork for my company which is identical to the original but has my logo on it and charge my company $0 for licensing... is there any prevention of this that I'm missing? IANAL but this legal portion here looks flimsy and lacks important definitions, especially with regards to protections from stuff like that.

I was excited by this project until I saw the license, and then I decided to not touch it at all until lawyers look at the license.

Sourcegraph CEO here. Fair Source is intended to allow companies to distribute both the product and source code, and still charge for the product. Fair Source is not an open-source license. Just as with GPL, there are restrictions around your usage of the code that are intended to produce longer-term benefits (in our case, making sure we can build the best product and have a sustainable business).

We have had it reviewed thoroughly by multiple lawyers in several countries, and it was drafted by Heather Meeker, who is extremely well respected. I am not a lawyer myself, but the "hypothetical loophole" scenario you described would involve you making a derivative work of our code—kind of like photocopying Harry Potter and adding some doodles in the margins, and reselling that. That would not circumvent any license or copyright situation.

> I am not a lawyer myself, but the "hypothetical loophole" scenario you described would involve you making a derivative work of our code—kind of like photocopying Harry Potter and adding some doodles in the margins, and reselling that.

So you're comparing someone who forked your project to add what could be major features, to someone doodling in the margins of Harry Potter? That's a really optimistic view of the open source community there. But I understand what you're saying, I'm just used to forks being a common practice in the FOSS community, so I expected them to be better accounted for.

You still haven't made it clear what would happen in the case of a fork. Even if they kept it under your license, who gets the money? How do they get paid? How are terms agreed to? Can it not be forked at all?

EDIT: This really applies to any modifications, essentially, say I make some modifications to your code, under what terms am I allowed to distribute them? Is the only way I can go to license them back to you without seeing any of this "fair" profit myself? What if you don't like them and decide not to use them can I redistribute them for free or fee on my own? Is there any way to make the forking and distribution of modifications as casual as it is with so many open source projects under other licenses today?

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.

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.

>Just as with GPL, there are restrictions around your usage of the code that are intended to produce longer-term benefits (in our case, making sure we can build the best product and have a sustainable business).

GPL benefits humanity, unfair source license benefits your bank account. Got it.

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