Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your company's core software products. The two basic features of Fair Source licensing are:
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Minimal Restrictions
Developers can read, use, and modify Fair Source software with minimal restrictions that protect the producer's business model.
Delayed Open Source
Fair Source software automatically becomes Open Source software, usually after two years.
Read more about Fair Source.
Fair Source provides as many of the benefits of Open Source to developers as companies are comfortable giving, while reserving and asserting a minimal set of exclusive rights to help achieve a sustainable business model. Consequently, Fair Source and Open Source are complementary approaches suited to different cases:
Fair Source works best for a company’s core software products.
Open Source is best for infrastructure shared across companies.
Read about the historical background of Fair Source and Open Source.
Fair Source provides many of the same benefits for companies as Open Source, by helping to foster an engaged developer community around your software products. In The Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Business Model, Professor Dirk Riehle of the University of Erlangen identifies the following benefits of such a community, by business function:
Sales
More and easier sales due to customer-side champions.
Marketing
Effective and cheaper marketing through engaged community.
Product Management
Superior product thanks to broad and deep user innovation.
Engineering
Faster development with immediate community feedback.
Support
Lower support costs thanks to self-supporting user community.
The basic steps to adopting Fair Source are to plan for community engagement, apply a license, audit and publish your source code, and announce that you are now Fair Source. For more details read our guide to joining Fair Source.
With minimal restrictions to protect the producer's business model, developers can read, use, modify, and redistribute Fair Source Software. Developers can propose modifications back to the producer if they wish, or simply benefit from the company's continual investment in maintenance and improvement. In the event a Fair Source product is abandoned or developed in an unsatisfactory direction, developers can fork a previous version.
Yes. Fair Source licenses are written such that it is difficult to violate them. If Fair Source Software includes feature restrictions based on certain criteria, the burden is on the software to monitor and enforce the criteria, not the user of the software.
No. There was a Fair Source License introduced in 2015, but it did not see wide adoption and the license steward abandoned it after about five years. In 2024, they generously gave us the assets (domain name, GitHub org, X handle). The old license was loosely aligned with our values and goals but would not be considered Fair Source Software by today's definition.