Fair License

Fair License
Author	James William Pye
Published	2004
SPDX identifier	Fair
OSI approved	Yes
GPL compatible	Yes
Copyleft	No
Linking from code with a different licence	Yes
Website	https://opensource.org/license/fair/

Last updated April 14, 2024

The Fair License is a short, simple and permissive free software licence. Its text is composed of only one sentence and a disclaimer, thus being the shortest license ever approved by the Open Source Initiative. It is also possible to use the Fair License for images, books, music or more generally all kinds of media.^{[ citation needed ]} The text of the license is as follows:

History

The author, James William Pye, submitted the license for approval in January 2004. During the approval process, James answered to some questions as quoted below and proposed a draft version:^[1]

. Tell us which existing OSI-approved license is most similar . to your license. [...]  The license is similar to the BSD license. The BSD license seems to imply a requirement of, what I call, Due Credit. Although, I wanted an explicit specification of Due Credit within my license. I also thought it more appropriate to use terms such as 'works' instead of 'source' to not be specific as to what was covered by the license within the license(Would this matter in a trial?). The Fair License is mainly a generalized BSD license(terminology-wise) with an explicit requirement of Due Credit by the retention and notification of the instrument.   . Explain how software distributed under your license can be . used in conjunction with software distributed under other . open source licenses.  Simply by retaining the license with the works that are covered by the license.   . Which license do you think will take . precedence for derivative or combined works?  I assume this is heavily dependent on the other license and perhaps even the works in question, but I am sure most other licenses would take precedence considering Fair's easy nature.

[...]

Utilization is defined as Any usage, transmission, distribution, publication, or mutation of the works, regardless of form.  Due Credit is defined as The mere acknowledgment of the affinity between the owner and the works thereof.  Utilization of the works protected by this instrument is permitted provided that the copyright owner receives Due Credit by meeting the following requirement:  This instrument must be retained with the works, regardless of form; so that any entity that exercises direct or indirect utilization of the works be notified of and understand all the information specified within this instrument and be required to accept and understand the terms of this license.  THE WORKS ARE PROVIDED BY THE OWNER "AS IS"; THUS ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR LIABILITIES FOR DAMAGES CAUSED BY THE WORKS ARE WHOLLY DISCLAIMED.

— James William Pye, For Approval: Fair License, https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2004-January/007573.html

Three days later, the almost-final version was defined as such:^[2]

Alteration to the license  . Remove superfluous definitions. . Shorten the disclaimer     I don't think it is necessary to elaborate on the disclamation of warranty. . Imply Due Credit(attribution) like the BSD License. . Remove explicit license acceptance/understanding requirement in the latter part of the permission requirement.     I think this is a well established implication within any license.   This is a pretty significant change, but I just want the meat and potatoes, so I got rid of the fluff.   The copyright and other identification information should be prepended to the license, which should be considered part of the instrument.  ---LICENSE--- <Copyright Information>  Utilization of the works is permitted provided that this instrument is retained with the works, so that any entity that utilizes the works is notified of this instrument.  DISCLAIMER: THE WORKS ARE WITHOUT WARRANTY.  [2004, Fair License: rhid.com/fair] ---LICENSE---  This shortens it up pretty well, but I think it is still effective.  Any comments are welcome.  Regards,         James William Pye

— James William Pye, For Approval: Fair License, https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2004-January/007622.html

One year later, James William Pye summarized his motivation as such:^[3]

The purpose of the license is to create a concise gift license. It contrasts from BSD and MIT and most other gift licenses by being "open-ended", rather than closed. That difference being that BSD and MIT specifically state the exercisable rights, whereas this license authorizes all the rights granted by authorship(all inclusive).  Without disclaimers, it has about half the number of words that MIT has. With disclaimers, it is significantly shorter. So despite the expansion, it still appears to be the shortest license out there. ;)

— James William Pye, For thoughts: fair license, https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/05/msg00013.html

In 2015, Brazilian programmer Talles Lasmar determined the Fair License to be dead (broken links, deleted Wikipedia article^[4]^[5]).^{[ better source needed ]} He contacted the original author and OSI, and created a new web site for it at http://fairlicense.org, which is also no longer active.

Translations

In 2007, Open Source Group Japan [ ja ] published a Japanese translation as such:^[6]

<著作権情報>  本成果物は、本契約書が成果物に保持され、これにより本成果物を使用する者すべてに本契約書が示されることを条件に、使用が許可されます。  免責条項： 本成果物の保証は一切ありません。

In 2013 users on the French Language Stack Exchange proposed a French translation as such:^[7]

<Information des droits d'auteur>  Les œuvres peuvent être réutilisées à condition d'être accompagnées du texte de cette licence, afin que tout utilisateur en soit informé.  AVERTISSEMENT : LES ŒUVRES N'ONT AUCUNE GARANTIE.

Related Research Articles

Free software, libre software, or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source license</span> Software license allowing source code to be used, modified, and shared

Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose. They grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications. These criteria are outlined in the Open Source Definition.

The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties. The ASF and its projects release their software products under the Apache License. The license is also used by many non-ASF projects.

The FreeBSD Documentation License is the license that covers most of the documentation for the FreeBSD operating system.

The Open Software License (OSL) is a software license created by Lawrence Rosen. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has certified it as an open-source license, but the Debian project judged version 1.1 to be incompatible with the DFSG. The OSL is a copyleft license, with a termination clause triggered by filing a lawsuit alleging patent infringement.

The Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (HPND) is an open source license, approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and verified as GPL-compatible by the Free Software Foundation. It is unique among the OSI's licenses because of the choices it allows in its construction; it lets the licensor pick anywhere from 0-2 warranty disclaimers, whether they want to prohibit the author's name from being used in publicity or advertising surrounding a distribution, and other spelling and grammar options. Besides this, the license can be almost functionally identical to the new, 3-clause BSD License, or the MIT License.

A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source code and object code forms, unless that software was developed by the United States Government, in which case it cannot be copyrighted. Authors of copyrighted software can donate their software to the public domain, in which case it is also not covered by copyright and, as a result, cannot be licensed.

A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. As of 2016, the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.

This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.

The ISC license is a permissive free software license published by the Internet Software Consortium, now called Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). It is functionally equivalent to the simplified BSD and MIT licenses, but without language deemed unnecessary following the Berne Convention.

Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, or sold even without any attribution by anyone; this is unlike the common case of software under exclusive copyright, where licenses grant limited usage rights.

The WTFPL is a permissive free software license. As a public domain like license, the WTFPL is essentially the same as dedication to the public domain. It allows redistribution and modification of the work under any terms. The name is an abbreviation of Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.

Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.

The University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, or UIUC license, is a permissive free software license, based on the MIT/X11 license and the 3-clause BSD license. By combining parts of these two licenses, it attempts to be clearer and more concise than either.

A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.

BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyleft</span> Practice of mandating free use in all derivatives of a work

Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, scientific discoveries and even certain patents.

The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.

The GNU All-permissive License is a lax, permissive (non-copyleft) free software license, compatible with the GNU General Public License, recommended by the Free Software Foundation for README and other small supporting files.

References

↑ James William Pye (2004-01-26). "For Approval: Fair License". comp.licenses.open-source.general (Mailing list). Retrieved 2020-07-27.
↑ James William Pye (2004-01-30). "For Approval: Fair License". comp.licenses.open-source.general (Mailing list). Retrieved 2020-07-27.
↑ James William Pye (2005-05-04). "For thoughts: fair license". debian-legal (Mailing list). Retrieved 2020-07-27.
↑ Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142#Why article Fair License has been deleted?
↑ "Public log for article Fair License". Wikipedia. 2015-04-17. Retrieved 2016-01-16.
↑ Shuji Sado (2007-05-22). "Fair license". Open Source Group Japan Wiki.
↑ "Traduction de " the instrument is retained with the works " dans une licence d'utilisation". French Language Stack Exchange . 2013-07-24. Retrieved 2016-01-16.

External links

Fair license at the Open Source Initiative
Fair license at the Software Package Data Exchange

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] James William Pye (2004-01-26). "For Approval: Fair License". comp.licenses.open-source.general (Mailing list). Retrieved 2020-07-27.

[2] James William Pye (2004-01-30). "For Approval: Fair License". comp.licenses.open-source.general (Mailing list). Retrieved 2020-07-27.

[3] James William Pye (2005-05-04). "For thoughts: fair license". debian-legal (Mailing list). Retrieved 2020-07-27.

[4] Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142#Why article Fair License has been deleted?

[5] "Public log for article Fair License". Wikipedia. 2015-04-17. Retrieved 2016-01-16.

[6] Shuji Sado (2007-05-22). "Fair license". Open Source Group Japan Wiki.

[7] "Traduction de " the instrument is retained with the works " dans une licence d'utilisation". French Language Stack Exchange . 2013-07-24. Retrieved 2016-01-16.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]