Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Fair Source Definition (via) Fail Source (fair.io) is the new-ish initiative from Chad Whitacre and Sentry aimed at providing an alternative licensing philosophy that provides additional protection for the business models of companies that release their code.

I like that they're establishing a new brand for this and making it clear that it's a separate concept from Open Source. Here's their definition:

Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your core products. Fair Source Software (FSS):

1. is publicly available to read;
2. allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer’s business model; and
3. undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).

They link to the Delayed Open Source Publication research paper published by OSI in January. (I was frustrated that this is only available as a PDF, so I converted it to Markdown using Gemini 1.5 Pro so I could read it on my phone.)

The most interesting background I could find on Fair Source was this GitHub issues thread, started in May, where Chad and other contributors fleshed out the initial launch plan over the course of several months.