[Go Make Things] Fair-Code

By rahmat hidayat

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

​ In response to my article yesterday about how open source is kind of broken, one of my readers introduced me to the idea of fair-code. Fair-code is not a software license. It describes a software model where software: is generally free to use and can be distributed by anybody has its source code openly available can be extended by anybody in public and private communities is commercially restricted by its authors Fair-Code is more-or-less open source, except the author of the code has sole control over commercialization. One version of a Fair-Code license is the the Commons Clause. This is effectively just a wrapper around your open source license of choice that prevents you from selling whatever you create with it… Without limiting other conditions in the License, the grant of rights under the License will not include, and the License does not grant to you, the right to Sell the Software. The one that really resonated with me, though, is n8n's sustainable use license. It lets you use the code for non-commercial and internal use, but not commercial public-facing purposes… You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes. They offer a separate commercial license that is essentially a modified version of the MIT License, where they retain ownership. The Fair-Code movement feels very much in the same spirit as the Craft CMS "free for personal use" license I talked about yesterday. There is currently an economic disconnect between the people who create a project and put the most work in and the people who want to make money using it. Fair-code can ensure that projects are long term financially viable for their authors to continue and implement new features, or at least somewhat economically advantageous to their authors should their software succeed. People have the freedom to use it, modify the code, and even redistribute it, but cannot exploit your labor for profit without fair compensation. Learn more at FairCode.io. Like this? A Go Make Things membership is the best way to support my work and help me create more free content. Cheers, Chris ​ Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser.​ ​

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