Fair Source Software Is Incredibly Unfair

So, I've noticed a disturbing trend recently with some of these new software movements. So, we have, of course, the free and open- source software movements, right? Free software and open- source software that is all about freedom. Anybody can use a piece of software for any reason they can imagine. The source code has to be available. You guys know all the rules to free software and open-source software. It's basically all about giving you ultimate freedom. It's all about everyone has the same rights and the same freedoms to do what they want to do with their software. And it's really important we maintain that freedom in our free and open-source software licensing. It's very important because we would not have some of the most important pieces of software on the planet like the Linux kernel for example. The Linux kernel that has probably hundreds of millions of machines running it around the world, hundreds of millions of servers. The entire worldwide web runs on Linux and Linux wouldn't exist if it wasn't licensed under a free license. In this case, the GPL version two. You know, the licensing is the reason so many people collaborated and worked on that thing. The minute you start adding modifications or restrictions to the licensing, especially restrictions that restrict people's freedom to do what they've been doing with that Linux kernel, that's the minute that project dies because you're going to just see a mass exodus of people that were contributing that will no longer contribute. But in recent years, we've had some people with a certain political ideology start infiltrating various free software communities and open source software communities. And they've tried to modify uh licensing and uh the definition of free software and the definition of open-source software because for whatever reason these people are really against freedom, right? The idea that anyone can use a piece of software for any reason, which is the backbone of free and open source software. That is that's the whole enchilada, right? That's what it's all about. And these people can't stand that. And they've created these new software movements like the ethical source movement, which sounds really cool. Ethical source. Well, that that must be a great thing. No, it's horrible. It discriminates against who can use the piece of software and the reasons they can use the software for. It's basically the ethical source was created by people of a certain political ideology and they don't want people from a different political ideology to be able to use their software. Obviously, that's discriminatory. It's vile. It's disgusting, right? It's not ethical at all. It's the unethical source movement. And we also have this movement here called the Fair Source Movement. And this one's a little more popular than the ethical source movement. I think most people recognize that trying to limit what people can do with their software is kind of bad. It's discriminatory. It's prejudice. It's bias. In many cases, it's racist. But this one flies under the radar a little bit, the fair source license movement, because these guys, what they want to do is they don't want to limit what people can do with the software. They want to limit the uh commercial use of a software. It's basically they want to tax the rich. They want if if you can afford it, you have to pay for the software. If you can't afford it, you don't pay for the software. So again, it's another one of these discriminatory kind of movements. It sounds cool. Fair source. Well, I like everything being fair, but kind of like the ethical source movement is totally unethical the way they do their licenses. The fair source movement is anything but fair. Because how is it fair to tax some people to use the software but not others, right? It's uh it's the exact opposite of freedom. It is the exact opposite of free software and open- source software. And these licenses, you know, the fair source licensing and there's several licenses for it. Same thing with the ethical source licensing. They are by definition proprietary software licenses. They do not fit under the definition of free software or open- source software. Even though these people kind of want people to think that they are sort of open source, quasi open- source, it's open source but better. So if you're not familiar with fair source, we should actually talk about what this is. So the model for fair source software typically is if you're using the software for non-commercial use, fine, right? Then other than that, you can modify and distribute, you know, things. It's it's a lot like open- source software as long as you're not using it for any kind of commercial use. The minute you start using it for any commercial use, that mandates that you have to obtain a license. You have to obtain a license which involves payment, right? You have to get a a license or permission to use that software if you're doing anything commercially with that software. Now, the source code for fair source software is typically source available, meaning the source is out there. You can go to GitHub or GitLab, wherever they're hosting their source. It's publicly available. You can go look at the code. You can contribute. But their aim here is to foster this environment where the community collaboration aspect of the software, all that gets financed by those that profit from use of the software. And where I think fair source is more dangerous than ethical source, I think most people recognize ethical source right away is uh something that should be shunned because it's very political in nature and it's all about uh limiting certain groups of people from using software. Fair Source, you know, it's they can infiltrate us in in a little bit different kind of way because we have a lot of people in the free and open source communities that do have a kind of socialist or communist kind of mindset. They like the idea of especially people that are successful uh organizations, companies that make a lot of money, you know, they like the idea of those companies having to pay more than the little guy. They like the idea, for example, of wealth redistribution. And that's kind of what Fair Source Software is. It's a wealth redistribution. Now, whatever your thoughts on wealth redistribution is, whatever your political ideologies on that are, just know this. It is in no way compatible with the idea of free and open source software. I'm not telling you, you know, your political ideologies are bad, but those political ideologies do not belong in free software or open source software because it's discriminatory and it is by definition not allowed to discriminate against anyone if it's free and open source software, right? That is just something we do not allow in the free and open source software community. And I know some people are going to be like, well, that's not really discriminating. Like, if a trillion dollar company like Google is using the software, they should have to pay. They should have to pay out the ass. They should really be financing the whole thing, right? They're the ones that we're really sticking it to. And, you know, screw Google, right? Hey, I get that. And, you know, being anti-corporate, that's kind of what we are, especially in the the false community, right? Where we kind of hate big trillion dollar corporations like Google, right? But here's the thing. It is discriminatory. It is unfair. You cannot charge someone else a higher price for software than what everybody else is charging. Again, that is discriminatory. Also, when it comes to open- source software, I mean, who are the companies that finance most of the big projects? I talked about the Linux kernel a minute ago. What companies really finance Linux development? Well, one of the biggest is Google, if not the biggest, because Google actually makes operating systems that are built around the Linux kernel. For example, Chrome OS and Android, right? Google makes billions of dollars probably every month because of Linux. And they spend millions of dollars, you know, maybe many millions of dollars. And they certainly have a lot of people that work for Google contributing code. So maybe not dollar amounts, but they are actually really putting in a lot of effort contributing code to the Linux kernel. The reason the Linux kernel is so great in large part is because of Google. So why would we need to modify the free software definition to get a big company to help finance some software, right? Because if they find it useful, they're going to contribute. They have to contribute, right? The for them not to contribute, it would be detrimental. It would affect their bottom line. So the free software model actually works and the big companies that make a lot of money on free software do contribute. In fact they greatly contribute and in many cases they contribute more than the average Joe like you or me. Now, proponents of fair source licensing say that, you know, one of the driving forces behind this movement is they want to try to secure a revenue stream, a revenue model for developers of software because a lot of people that work on free and open source software, for example, they don't make any money, right? Most people that work on open source software make no money at all for working on the software that they work on. Typically, when you're talking about free and open source software, I mean the model, their financial model is typically people please donate to me, right? It's all about donations. Sometimes it's indirect monetization methods like consulting or offering support contracts, things like that. And I'm certainly somebody that supports the idea that developers should make money. You know, the people that make free and open source software. I hope everybody succeeds in their goals in life. And of course, some of that is going to include getting paid for a lot of the work they do. But you also have to understand when it comes to free and open source software, you know, you've got millions and millions and millions of people around the world contributing to all of this software and uh nobody's really getting paid for it, right? And I understand that the the lead dev of a project, you know, he hopes he can make a few bucks because he's probably putting in a lot more time than the other people that are contributing, but a lot of it has to just come down to the marketplace, right? The marketplace of software, right? How many people are using your software? How many people find your software uh something that they use on a daily basis, especially something that they use for commercial use? I I know that's kind of crazy, but if your free and open source software is something that is used by a lot of people in life and in work and it's something they can't live without, those people typically will donate, you know, they will donate money to make sure that that piece of software keeps getting developed. They will donate time, they will donate code, right? They will make commits themselves to help that piece of software go forward. So in the end, if your piece of free and open source software has any real staying power at all, somebody's going to contribute to the project. And the idea that you can just force people to pay, you know, and just certain groups of people, you know, certain groups of people don't have to pay, some groups of people do have to pay. And and you I talk about fair source, it's typically, hey, if you're using it for commercial use, you have to pay. If it's non-commercial use, you don't have to pay. I've even seen some people in the community suggest that it's just certain organizations, you know, or certain people that make a certain amount of money, right? If you are well off financially, you should pay, but the little guy, he shouldn't pay. And obviously, that's discrimination. That's that's something that we as the free and open source software community, we could never let that stand. Oddly enough, I've seen a lot of proprietary software that is more fair in their licensing than these fair source guys because a lot of proprietary software out there, I mean take Microsoft Windows, right? They give away copies of Windows to people in third world countries, people that could never pay the licensing that those of us in the US for example, you know, have to pay licensing fees for a lot of their software. But, you know, they realize that poor people could never pay for their software. But hey, everybody around the world uses Windows and Microsoft Office, right? And most of those people did not pay for those products. So what is the idea behind fair source? I mean, what's the purpose of this if it's just another proprietary license? Well, I think it's kind of like the ethical source movement. It's just people with a certain political ideology are just trying to ram that into anything and everything. and they're just trying to they're basically trying to alter the course of free and open source software. They hope free and open source software eventually dies and then we're just left with crap like fair source and ethical source. And there are big companies that use fair source licensing because uh here's some of the licenses that they recommend. So some of the ones here on their website for fair.io is the functional source license. You'll see this one used often, the fair core license, a little less so. Business source license. The business source license is the one that cockroach DB uh switched to. So that's a a realworld company. Uh another real world company that switched to fair source licensing was MongoDB. They use uh their uh what is it called? The serverside public license, the SSPL. That's a fair source license. Recently Reddis Labs went to fair source licensing. They use something called Reddis source available license. It's their own custom fair source licensing. And what do all these companies that have moved to fair source licensing have in common? Well, those of us in the free and open source software communities, we just kind of forgot about those companies, right? and Reddus, we've got no use for them anymore because of the licensing, right? And again, it's kind of like when I said Linux, you know, the Linux kernel would not exist without the free licensing, without that GPL, right? The minute the license changes, everything goes away. Everything's destroyed. All your community is destroyed. And that's kind of what has happened with companies like MongoDB. Why would I use MongoDB? You know, if I was if it was all about the free nature of it, and free as in freedom, that nature of it, as soon as you go to a different model that restricts freedom, yeah, I I'm just going to move to an alternative product. So, I hope more people in this space, I hope more people in the free software community and the open source software community, they recognize the threat that some of these movements, these alternative movements like the fair source movement, it's a real threat and we need to be paying attention. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Matt, Steve, George, Darloff, Lee, Mark, Methos, Aran, Peace, Archin, Fedor, Roland, Morgan, and Abuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode about fair source licensing would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these [clears throat] names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about free and open source software, not fair source software, screw fair source software. If you want to see free and open source software, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.

There is a new "software movement" that seems to be gaining ground. It's the "fair source" movement, and it's quite discriminatory in nature. Sadly, I see some within the FOSS community actually advocating for "fair source." REFERENCED: ► https://fair.io/ WANT TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL? 💰 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/distrotube 💳 Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MW3ZFGS8Q9JGW 🛍️ Amazon: https://amzn.to/2RotFFi 👕 Teespring: https://teespring.com/stores/distrotube DT ON THE WEB: 🕸️ Website: http://distro.tube 📁 GitLab: https://gitlab.com/dwt1 🗨️ Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@distrotube 👫 Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DistroTube/ 📽️ Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DistroTube:2 FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT I LIKE: 🌐 Brave Browser - https://brave.com/ 📽️ Open Broadcaster Software: https://obsproject.com/ 🎬 Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org 🎨 GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/ 💻 VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/ 🗒️ Doom Emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!