FairSoftware of Mountain View, CA provides a framework for individuals to collaborate and create businesses around software development projects.
The Web site helps you find skilled individuals to work on your project, manage shares of the business, sell the product, and distribute profits among the shareholders. Unlike elance.com and other marketplaces that enable developers to bid on projects, FairSoftware project owners assign shares to contributors.
Those shares represent a percentage of future revenue. When the product is ready for sale, FairSoftware handles the transaction, collecting revenues then automatically distributing profits among the project participants.
At the centerpiece of Fair Software is its Software Bill of Rights (SBOR), a guideline for software business management and revenue share modeled after the GPL that governs open source collaborations. The SBOR guarantees that as the software is sold, all contributors are fairly compensated.
Fair Software represents a fresh approach to developing and managing software project-based businesses, a model somewhere between shareware and open source.
Based on the principles of fair compensation for contributed effort and transparency in business operation, FairSoftware may well find that it has applications beyond the software development community. As we reviewed the beta site in early July, we saw no reason why the platform wouldn’t work for a variety of other business types, particularly those that trade in digital media.
