Show HN: Is Fair Source Cool Yet? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Is Fair Source Cool Yet?

fss.cool

5 pointsezekg7 comments

It's amusing that people think that a two-year lag in licensing is enough to thwart the so-called freeloaders.

It could take way more time than that just for you to get noticed and have any users at all.

If your popularity starts 8 years from now, and your license converts to BSD-like or whatever 2 years from now, that's as good as just licensing it that way today.

I think how you want to work this is that the license goes free N years after the estimated date when you hit a base of M users.

You may be misunderstanding the delayed open source bit [0]. Typically, this will manifest itself through commits, but isn't limited to that (releases, etc.). For example, if commit A is made on 2024-09-27, and commit B is made on 2024-09-28, A will be open source on 2026-09-27, and B on 2026-09-28. That means that any "free-rider", e.g. a competitor, is 2 years behind master (assuming the project is still maintained).

[0]: https://opensource.org/dosp

I built this to try out shadcn/ui and to better keep tabs on new Fair Source [0] projects. I was pleasantly surprised to discover quite the lot of projects previously unknown to me, including several large ones. It's particularly cool to see adoption of the FCL [1], initially drafted for my company.

[0]: https://fair.io

[1]: https://fcl.dev

Okay. Let's talk about the semantics of the pariah being targeted by some of the fair source rhetoric.

Is it "free-rider" as in beer? Or "free-rider" as in speech?

I'm having trouble even conceptualizing "free-riding" [0] as in speech.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

But the free as a free speech is the free that matters in software.

So it must be that if free riders are bad, they must be some kind of free speech type free riders. Because ordinary free software advocates, such as oh your Richard Stallman and whoever, do not refer to nonpaying, free beer users as free riders. Nonpaying software users do not make the software less available to others, and it is helpful to the development of that software to have those kind of users compared to none at all.

I can easily conceptualize free speech free riders with an example with an example: users who dare to find security bugs, and tell others, without letting the copyright holder know first and letting that copyright holder gatekeep the release of information.

I do not know to much about fair source yet but as a note it would be nice if the graph on your site hat axis labels without clicking on it

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