[inktype]

Thanks. My initial reaction upon reading the submitted title was dismissive because I dislike when companies mimic the prestige of open source by saying "source available" while having a practically proprietary license.

This is the first time I've seen FSL and it is quite nice. Surely "source available" is the wrong term to label the license with.

[swyx]

> mimic the prestige of open source by saying "source available"

no, its just the correct term, we literally ask people who use the wrong license to change their terminology to "source available", lets not punish people who do it right from the get go

[inktype]

You misunderstood my comment; we probably agree. If something isn't open source, it shouldn't be labeled as open source.

I'm saying that there ought to be a more descriptive term for this license to differentiate from the usual proprietary "source available" licenses. ezekg's comment gives an appropriately descriptive label, "Fair Source".

[foresto]

> I dislike when companies mimic the prestige of open source by saying "source available"

It can be a practical need, rather than a prestige grab. Some people can only sink time into developing their software if sales of that software pay their bills. The redistribution rights granted by an open-source license somewhat conflict with this, by allowing another party to appropriate their original work and use it to undercut them. (This is part of why a revenue model based on services, rather than sales, is often encouraged in open-source.)

Meanwhile, the author might very much want to offer customers other rights granted by open-source licenses, like the ability to inspect the code, or to have it audited, or to modify it, or to build it from source as an assurance of what instructions are being executed. This is a situation where "source available" makes sense.

Looking at it from the other direction, some potential customers will only accept software that grants the latter rights, but don't care about redistribution rights. "Source available" is a viable option for them as well.

I wonder if it would be helpful to have a new, clearly defined term for a class of licenses granting inspection & modification rights without redistribution rights, and explicitly protecting users from additional restrictions like fees for source access. That could help make licensing of this kind easy to identify and understand, and if that meant wider acceptance, perhaps more developers would be willing to release their source code to users.

(I do see "Fair Source" mentioned in another comment, but I haven't investigated to see if it aligns with what I'm describing.)

[ezekg]

> Surely "source available" is the wrong term to label the license with.

There's a new term coming very soon, "Fair Source." :)

See: https://fair.io