Two months ago I wrote about a licence built with the best of intentions: Mark Qvist’s bespoke Reticulum licence, which tried to shield a mesh networking stack from corporate capture and fenced off a piece of the commons in the process. That one felt like an honest mistake by a tired maintainer. This post is about a licence family that makes a similar trade on purpose, with a marketing site, a definition, a list of adopting companies, and a word chosen to make you feel good about it.

The word is “fair”. The project is Fair Source, at fair.io, and I am not a fan.