Keith Schacht’s Weblog

Fair Source. I’ve been keeping an eye on this initiative started by Sentry. One of the most common ways I see product companies utilizing open source is to release their software via open source and then make money by running a paid version of the service for people who don’t want to self-host.

With this approach, it can undermine your business strategy if someone else decides to run a competing version of your hosted service using your open source software. I believe this was Sentry’s primary motivation. I’ve also seen talk of Business Source License (BSL) but am unsure of the difference between this and Fair Source. Some day I may dig into this.