ZeroMQ

Infinite Property

One of the saddest myths of the knowledge business is that ideas are a sensible form of property. It’s medieval nonsense that should have been junked along with slavery, but sadly it’s still making too many powerful people too much money.

Ideas are cheap. What does work sensibly as property is the hard work we do in building a market. “You eat what you kill” is the right model for encouraging people to work hard. Whether it’s moral authority over a project, money from consulting, or the sale of a trademark to some large, rich firm: if you make it, you own it. But what you really own is “footfall,” participants in your project, which ultimately defines your power.

To do this requires infinite free space. Thankfully, GitHub solved this problem for us, for which I will die a grateful person (there are many reasons to be grateful in life, which I won’t list here because we only have a hundred or so pages left, but this is one of them).

You cannot scale a single project with many owners like you can scale a collection of many small projects, each with fewer owners. When we embrace forks, a person can become an “owner” with a single click. Now they just have to convince others to join by demonstrating their unique value.

So, in ØMQ, we aimed to make it easy to write bindings on top of the core library, and we stopped trying to make those bindings ourselves. This created space for others to make them, become their owners, and get that credit.