You are quoting the language of the SBR properly. You can’t contribute open source code under the SBR license, because technically, well, the open source license wouldn’t allow you to relicense it. But as long as you contribute your knowledge of how, for instance, to link open source code to the rest of your executable, so that it obeys whatever open source license that code is using, then you are good, and that can count as a contribution from FairSoftware’s point of view.

A layman way of saying this is that you can’t contribute open source code because you don’t have copyright on it, but you can build a FairSoftware project which uses open source. If you obey the terms of the open source license.

We wrote the language so that people are reminded that they don’t own open source code, and they can’t freely relicense it. But it doesn’t mean you can’t use it.

I know my answer sounds complicated. Ask again and maybe I’ll be clearer?

PS: I’m assuming we are discussing open source code that you didn’t author. If you are the author, then you can always dual-license it.

Alain.

You bring up open source (btw, you could also argue that the GPL is one-size-fits-all). The Software Bill of Rights is not so much “opposed” to open source projects. Of course, anytime you talk about making money from software, you are not directly in line with free software. But as long as you obey the terms of the open source license you use, you could host your project with FairSoftware. Just be aware that someone else could use your code to give away the same product.

Just like Red Hat was not really writing new code so much as packaging freely available existing code, but still making money from doing so.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback and keep telling us where we can improve. This is just an alpha after all.

Alain.