Most people think you can't capture value from Open Source because open means people will always take it for free But as Phil explains below, this isn't true. It's never been true, at least for larger companies, who are the vast majority of the market So what's the real issue? The way to capture value, and use that value to fund further open development, was identified 25 years ago In "The Magic Cauldron", Eric Raymond explains whats required: a market to price code econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/… But no one ever figured out how to create such a market In 2016, I had the idea that proof of work could create a market for a very particular type of open code.. Algorithms for "hard to solve but easy to verify" problems But how useful is this in the real world? It turns out, it's everything we need