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