Who said anything about
forced open sourcing?
People naturally tend to give things away in a gift economy when the marginal cost of making a copy is zero. Dan Pink explains it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Consider science: it is a privilege in most scientific disciplines to publish one’s discoveries openly for everyone to build on. Except in the bio and pharma departments — there, the intellectual property system has made generically engineered crops trap farmers and has made drugs extremely expensive in the very country that enforces this system. I wrote about Open Source Drugs a whopping 12 years ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93
Newton said, “if I saw further, it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants”. He didn’t pay rent to the giants for those shoulders.
Thomas Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Albert Wenger, a friend of mine who is a venture capitalist, general partner at Union Square Ventures here in NY and who raised their climate fund, wrote an entire book called World After Capital about this very thing, and is giving it away: https://worldaftercapital.org
Back then, USV and other VCs were really bullish on Utility Tokens as a way for the participants to own the network, and to incentivize open source voluntarily, without government force:
https://avc.com/category/blockchain/
I also mentioned Meta open sourcing ML, and said you should be thankful to Zuck’s tendencies, which he can exercise in an area that isn’t a core business proposition of facebook. The capitalists have stranged Mark Z’s tendencies in every area where Facebook could extract rents and profits from its ecosystem. And in this, it could have easily gone another way had an IP-loving Steve Jobs type been at the helm. Had FB chosen to branch out into it, like Apple did into, say, banking or cars, then you would see FAR LESS open source competition in AI. Maybe Bloom model?