77 lines
4.1 KiB
Text
77 lines
4.1 KiB
Text
From http://open.hardcoded.net/about/ on 2012-10-27.
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About Fairware
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Free as in speech, Fair as in trade
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"Fairware" is a term I coined recently to designate open source
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development of software targeting a wide audience (typically
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published in the form of "Shareware" in the proprietary world) with
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expectation of fair compensation from users. It's a mix of two
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driving principles:
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1. Intellectual property doesn't make sense (at least in the software
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world). The protection of intellectual property causes much grief
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all over the world, all the time. Software patents threatens
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developers at every corner, like land mines. Proprietary licensing
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makes developers create the same software over and over again in
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a silly competition game, making the end user suffer in the end
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(for not having access to the collaborative effort instead of the
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competitive one). Some users fall in the hands of some unethical
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software companies that will squeeze every penny they can from
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them, taking advantage from the fact that they're captive users.
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2. Developers have to eat. It's hard for open source developers
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doing generic software targeting a wide audience to get compensated
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for their work. Sure, they may receive some donations from users,
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but certainly not enough to allow them to work full time on their
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applications. Because of this, they only work on their open source
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software in their spare time, and this generally reduces the quality
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of it. Chances are, if they could, they'd quit their day job and
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work on their software full time, creating a fair alternative to
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their proprietary competitors, slowly making intellectual property
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irrelevant, but money unfortunately flows towards these proprietary
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software developers, starving the overall open source effort.
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Fairware is open source software with the assumption that some
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users are fair. If we can assume that (and I sure hope we can), we
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can build a system helping them to "express their fairness" (to
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contribute). With the typical "Donate" button, figuring out what
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is the fair thing to do is hard, even for a fair user (read this
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article for more details). Who worked on the project? How many
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hours? How much did they receive yet? These are all questions that
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need to be answered before determining a fair amount of money to
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give to a project. Chances are, even when users are fair, laziness
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takes over and these users end up not donating, for lack of
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information to make a correct judgement.
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How does Fairware work? All hours developers invest in projects
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are public, as well as their hourly rate expectations. All
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contributions from fair users are also instantly made public
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(anonymously). When contributions are made, they are allocated to
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unpaid development hours (see the F.A.Q. for details). Everyone
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can thus easily know how many hours have yet to be compensated.
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Also, users are made aware that the software is Fairware with a
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dialog that pops up for users who haven't contributed yet, reminding
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them of expectations from developers. With enough fair users, such
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a system allows open source developers working on software for a
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wide audience to do so full time. I don't know about you, but I
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find that awesome.
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An opt-in system. After a couple of testing and tweaking of the
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fairware system, I realized that many users didn't want to hear
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about intellectual property and just wanted to know how much it
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costs. By trying to force them to learn about fairware, there's a
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risk of alienating them and thus turning away a user who would
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otherwise pay for the software. This is why I recently made the
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fairware system optional. By default, HS apps behave like shareware
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apps: You can try it for free, but unless you pay for it, there
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are demo limitations. This way, we don't confuse newcomers ("An
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open source app for which I have to pay?! What is this new devilry?").
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Now that you've read about fairware, if you want to enable the
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fairware mode, all you have to do is to open the registration key
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dialog, type "fairware" in any of the two fields and click submit.
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Developers wanted! Are you a developer? Do you like this idea?
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Whether you'd like to get involved with HS projects, or make your
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own Fairware project, please let me know!
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