fair license

[James William Pye]

On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 16:54 -0600, Nick Welch wrote:
> Does that mean that the license needs to be distributed with binaries
> built from the source, or does "the works" mean only the source that the
> license appears in?

Well, I think binaries would be a derivative work, so the license must,
somehow, be retained; at least that was the desired effect.

> Does the MIT/X license require it (I didn't think it did)?

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
        "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
        included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

I would take that to include binaries.

> Basically, I am asking: is this license more restrictive than the X/MIT?
> Or is it essentially a less explicit/verbose version of it?

I would call it more demanding, rather than restrictive; per the
requirement of notification of the fair license for acknowledgment, as
opposed to the mere retention of the MIT/X license for potential
acknowledgment. Other than that, it is mostly a more terse form of
BSD/MIT/X/[core idea behind most non-pervasive open source licenses],
which is the primary reason why I chose to write it(terseness). (Well,
it came about when I was instrument-stamping some code and became
annoyed when I noticed how much space a BSD license took up. Yeah, I
swoon at the sight of a GPL. ;)

The purpose of the requirement of notification was to disallow
users[distributors, derivers, etc.] from hiding the instrument for
whatever reasons of deception an entity might have. I don't consider
"retaining" a license somewhere inside a binary of a
distribution/derivative without some obvious way to extract/find it as
fulfilling the purpose of retention. Conversely, it, ideally, should not
be required that an instrument is to be displayed to users in flashing
text on some banner every five minutes to warrant notification.
My thoughts on being safe rather than sorry are simply that a user
should make attempts of notification with a volume that meets or exceeds
that of the creator's.

[btw, I've been using 'Use' in my instruments instead of 'Usage'. It's
shorter. ;]

See:
	http://svn.rhid.org/law/license/fair/root/source

I've also been toying with a couple other variants:
	http://svn.rhid.org/law/license/fair/fork/

IANAL! =)
-- 
Regards, James William Pye
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