And this is one of the core problems of such licenses, according to Thierry Carrez, general manager at the Open Infrastructure Foundation and board member at the Open Source Initiative: Much is open to interpretation and can be “legally fuzzy.“Fair source licenses are not open source licenses because the freedoms they grant do not apply to everyone; they discriminate based on legally fuzzy noncompete rules,” Carrez said.“So, widespread adoption of those licenses would not only create legal uncertainty, it would also significantly reduce innovation going forward.
He went through a whole gamut of licensing considerations, including fully proprietary, before settling on FSL and publicly proclaiming his support of the fair source movement.“We are still somewhat unsure what our final business model will be, exactly, and want to retain our options,” Chacon told TechCrunch.“We know that if a company releases under an OSS license and then needs to relicense under something more restrictive in order to make their business work, there is an understandable outcry from the community.
The fair source concept is designed to help companies align themselves with the “open” software development sphere, without encroaching into existing licensing landscapes, be that open source, open core, or source-available, and while avoiding any negative associations that exist with “proprietary.
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