2 items tagged “chad-whitacre”
2024
The Fair Source Definition (via) Fair 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):
- is publicly available to read;
- allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer’s business model; and
- 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.
The Open Source Sustainability Crisis (via) Chad Whitacre: “What is Open Source sustainability? Why do I say it is in crisis? My answers are that sustainability is when people are getting paid without jumping through hoops, and we’re in a crisis because people aren’t and they’re burning out.”
I really like Chad’s focus on “jumping through hoops” in this piece. It’s possible to build a financially sustainable project today, but it requires picking one or more activities that aren’t directly aligned with working on the core project: raising VC and starting a company, building a hosted SaaS platform and becoming a sysadmin, publishing books and courses and becoming a content author.
The dream is that open source maintainers can invest all of their effort in their projects and make a good living from that work.