> the vocal proponents of OSS purity
Hey, that's me! :-)
(the following is not targeted at you, but at the "Fair Source" idea. You are just the messenger here presenting the idea, I wouldn't shoot you. Although I do respectfully take issue with some phrasing of yours, which I take as an occasion to explain my rebuttal of the Fair Source idea:)
> There's this emerging notion of "Fair Source" that attempts to meet halfway between open participation and business interests
Open source is not necessarily open participation. See for instance SQLite: open source, but not open participation.
Open source is also not at odds with business interests, given the right business model. See also SQLite, and the many successful commercial open source projects.
Open participation and business interests can also go hand in hand, but my comment is already too long to develop on this and I want to focus on the free software aspect.
I reject this idea that source available but not open source being fair and being some "middle ground" between proprietary and FLOSS. User empowerment and freedom is not only 50% lost in the process, it is almost totally lost. There are few things we can do with some code we can't use anyway. There's nothing fair to the user about proprietary software, and the source availability of the software is only barely relevant to this. There's no middle ground: either you have the fundamental rights allowing you to control your computing, or you don't have them.
I think seeing those things as fair / middle grounds is a dangerous idea. The idea that open source prevents doing business and open source needing some taming down for businesses to succeed is also dangerous.
There's a reason to be adamant with the "purity" of licenses being free software without compromise. It's because if you lose even one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the free software definition, you lose control of your computing.
I guess I probably sound like some fanatic.
To be clear, I was not part of the people reacting on the Winamp repository, and I think things need to be discussed respectfully.