The Glory of Achievement

Working In Public, despite being a superlative book-length tour of the open source movement, isn’t really about collaborative software development. It’s really about how a virtualized, digital world decoupled from the physical constraints of manufacturing and meatspace politics manages to both pay for and govern itself despite no official legal fra... See more

But a shift has happened nonetheless: the Internet used to reflect our real-world lives and the physical world. Increasingly, our real lives and physical worlds are just a reflection of our digital ones.

Attention is to a virtual economy what the gold bullion used to be to the Bretton Woods economy, or what computation aspires to be in a cryptocurrency economy: the ultimate measure of value that everything boils down to in the end. Despite code being the most ethereal and intangible good there is—human thought distilled as runnable logic—it’s made ... See more

Here again, Eghbal provides a framework that transcends the open-source context that inspired it. In a digital economy, goods are either excludable or not (meaning paywall-able, essentially), and rivalrous or not (meaning infinitely copyable at zero marginal cost or not). The resulting 2 × 2 matrix describes just about every way to make a buck onli... See more

But sometimes the mystery escapes even practitioners: many of the selfless contributors Eghbal quotes have trouble making ends meet, and either do freelance consulting on the very code they created, set up Patreons like other struggling artists, or hold down day jobs often not even related to their projects.

Broadly, the line between excludable and non is the line between where subscriptions vs. ads reign as business models.