[gen220]

I think there are a few common themes, from my perspective:

1. Be popular "for the people": as in, you're used by and contributed to by a passionate community. (Wikipedia, vim/emacs, pretty much any gnu project) Commercial interest is tangential or very indirectly related to the service.

2. Alternatively to (1), be a valuable and costly-to-replicate component of many large, for-profit companies doing their normal business (linux, postgres/mysql, wordpress, almost any apache/cloud native project, nginx)

3. Especially if you're going for (2) over (1), adopt a governance strategy that prevents a project's popularity from bending to commercial interests (postgres, linux for positive examples; see mozilla and countless recent "oss" companies for counter-examples of varying degree).

4. Keep your footprint small, and do not raise outside capital, even if you're going route (2). This one speaks for itself; you don't want outside influence to force a sale or watering down of (3). It is perfectly OK to earn revenue (for donations, support, etc.), but be extremely wary of debt or equity sales.

There are tactics for achieving these ingredients, such as registering as a non-profit, developing a project in public with a FOSS license, using federated architecture.

IMO, there is no correct choice to make amongst those tactics: it really depends on what you're building, and for whom.

In general, I'd be suspicious of projects that are allergic to revenue, but want to be long-lived. Be suspicious of projects that religiously insist on some tactic (e.g. fediverse) without a sound justification rooted in strategy.

[rgbrgb]

Super thoughtful, thanks. Notably these are all social or legal rather than technical in nature and that does seem to be a viable way to tackle this. There are a number of ventures that have stayed relatively consistent over time (like hundreds of years) by staying small and focused [0]. I hope that postgres and linux will be on that list in 1000 years.

Still, pretty curious about if we might be able to enforce it at the infrastructure level (e.g. build something that technically cannot be co-opted) rather than trust humans not to take a liquidity event. I think part of the bandcamp outrage emerged because the epic acquisition went agains what people thought was the preceived "stay indie" company ethos. I'm definitely not one of the people mad about it (I took an exit!), but the level of outrage + looking at these blockchain incumbents (which look scammy but perhaps technically interesting) has me thinking there might be a way.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

[gen220]

If avoiding sale-of-ownership to a capitalistic entity is a strategic goal, incorporating as a non-profit is one tactic. Among other protections, ownership of non-profits in the US (501c3) cannot be purchased by for-profit entities.

A 501c3 can be a parent company for a for-profit company (e.g. Mozilla-Co is owned by the Mozilla-Foundation), so it's still possible to operate a "normal" company within the IP-ownership structure of a a 501c3.

Edit: it's worth noting that family-owned businesses with a trust component have also done really well in the last 100 years. (see the NYT, which is governed by the Sulzberger family [126 years], and many others on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_family_bus...)