Two months ago I wrote about a licence built with the best of intentions: Mark Qvist’s bespoke Reticulum licence, which tried to shield a mesh networking stack from corporate capture and fenced off a piece of the commons in the process. That one felt like an honest mistake by a tired maintainer. This post is about a licence family that makes a similar trade on purpose, with a marketing site, a definition, a list of adopting companies, and a word chosen to make you feel good about it.

The word is “fair”. The project is Fair Source, at fair.io, and I am not a fan.

The dominant narrative surrounding artificial intelligence is one of extreme concentration. We are told that AI is a race that can only be run by a handful of multi-billion dollar companies in California or Seattle, using massive server farms that consume megawatts of power and millions of litres of water. In this frame, the rest of the world is reduced to mere consumers of foreign models, source material for scraping pipelines, or low-paid data labelling labour.

In part one I explained why I keep doing things the hard way, and in part two who is actually prying the doors open. This is the hard way itself: the choices I made turning a Pixel 10 Pro running GrapheneOS into a phone I can live with, what worked, what didn’t, and what I still haven’t solved. If you’re thinking about making the switch, I hope it saves you a few of the Saturday afternoons it cost me.