Open source and web3, simplified

Tie revenue from the enterprise version directly to the token so that everyone gets paid in proportion to the success of the overall project (open source + service model)

What web3 offers for me, via more flexible and dynamic forms of digital ownership, is business models where decentralized organizations and public goods can be tied directly to equity and revenue streams — the merger of Red Hat and Linux, via tokens. If we can do that, the foundation of open resources we can build will increase dramatically and pow... See more

Why don’t all of those Linux developers just build the enterprise layer themselves and use the profits to fund their work? To answer that question, consider the steps the Linux community would have to take to make that work:

Now consider the same scenario but where you have essentially infinitely flexible and inexpensive ways to coordinate around digital ownership. This is the promise of web3 — let’s run through those same steps above but via tokens: 

Reward contributors to the open source version with a token as well

Create a DAO that looks by all respects like a traditional organization except that it uses tokens for ownership and governance.

Basically, enterprise customers would rather pay a fee to get a premium SaaS type model of the product that has the security and privacy functionality they need, rather than doing the work of using the open source version and building that functionality themselves. Red Hat was acquired by IBM in 2019 for 34 billion and generates billions a year in ... See more

Use those tokens and the cash the DAO creates to pay developers of unsexy work and the sales/marketing team.

Develop some sales/marketing team to deal with enterprise clientsFind developers that are willing to do the less sexy work of building an enterprise service business, likely via compensating them competitively with the private marketFigure out how to reward everyone proportional to their contribution if they do end up creating this multi-billion do... See more

One problem with these centralized business models is that they are essentially parasitic to their decentralized counterparts - what makes Linux so valuable is that with thousands of contributors it can offer a level of stability and integrations that other operating systems can’t.