Fair-code is not a software license. It describes a software model where software:
- is generally free to use and can be distributed by anybody
- has its source code openly available
- can be extended by anybody in public and private communities
- is commercially restricted by its authors
If only there was an article that described the monetization of such a model… oh, wait…
So if I want to improve their software I need to pay them. Got it.
That has to be one of the laziest, obvious trolls I’ve seen in a while. Could you at least put a little more effort into understanding the thing you’re railing against and not showing your blatant ignorance? That is not what was said and you know it. Do better.
“Hey, developer, your software is just about perfect for my use case, I just need to make this one small change. Can I go ahead and do that?”
"Sure, you can make that change, just as soon as you pay us $X. Oh, and we are planning on including that feature in the next release, so you can go ahead and buy that from us.
How much profit is Redis or Hashicorp kicking back to the people the contributed to it when it was FOSS? It’s just “Fair code” now to allow its “creators” to profit, right?
Without every single contributor assigning copyright to a single entity for their code, the only way to commercialize a program distributed under such a license is to get every single contributor to agree to it separately (or not use their code).
If every single contributor assigns copyright to a single entity, the project is now controlled by it, and unless that entity was particularly nice with its contracts, those contributors are now powerless if (for example) this entity decides to change the license.