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> But aren't people complaining about the status quo, and RedHat infringing on open source rights? Yup, people are complaining about the status quo. RedHat may

> But aren't people complaining about the status quo, and RedHat infringing on open source rights? Yup, people are complaining about the status quo. RedHat may be, in spirit, infringing on the freedoms granted by the GPL, but in practice I would generally bet that RedHat/IBM's lawyers figure that they're not legally doing anything wrong. If you read between the lines here at who's complaining and what they're complaining about, it's not generally speaking RedHat's paying customers. A few might be but by and large it's people who want to run RHEL-compatible alternatives without buying RedHat's support contracts. > With the utility tokens approach, they wouldn't need to restrict those rights. I still don't get what you mean when you say that. Let's say I spin up a corporation called BlueHat. My goal is to make a rock solid, stable, long-term support Linux distribution and provide for-pay technical support for clients. I also want to make a healthy profit while doing so. How would that work with utility tokens? Is there something I'm missing where a utility token would make it feasible to share the complete source and build instructions for the distribution I'm putting together while still having enough revenue to pay everyone every two weeks and have some left over to take home and buy food with? Edit: > anything related to Web3 is dismissed out of hand I am, honest to God, not at all trying to dismiss this. I'm trying to understand how I would set up a business model similar to RedHat within this kind of framework. Developers and techs that I hand-select and hire to provide an OS distribution that we control and provide paid support for, while all of us making enough money to pay our mortgages and buy food every two weeks.

EGreg 3y ago
Well, I don't have all the answers for every industry, but the broad strokes as what I said. Utility tokens really only work when you need services of other people in a network, often requested and delivered over a network. They aren't really as useful for software that you can run locally on your computer. So, for example, hosting RedHat software on an Amazon instance, RedHat can work with Amazon to make sure it enforces licensing fees. If Amazon doesn't then RedHat can, theoretically, sue the company or pull its licensing for any further instances, hurting both companies. But RedHat could launch a new product line centering around servers running their machines, "commoditizing their complements", and doing jobs. Kind of like Adobe turned to SaaS instead of software running on your computer. Or how wordpress.com makes the bulk of the money for Automattic instead of self-hosted Wordpress. They'd have to start managing infrastructure, basically, or partner with Amazon as they already do. I guess my overall point is that more software should be funded in the beginning using utility tokens, so they never get a big shareholder class and thus never have to go IPO to generate a return. Thus they never have to impress investors on Wall Street earnings calls, by how many rents they've extracted from their ecosystem via greater enshittification.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  Ahhh ok, I think that's where the wires got crossed. From your original post, I got the impression that you were suggesting that somehow RedHat's existing business model could be converted to using utility tokens and allow them to freely redistribute all of their RPM sources and build scripts without having their OS distribution cloned. I suppose my last question, having flipped around through the Qbix site a fair bit and grokking a bunch of the concepts of how it all fits together... I think I get how Qbux move around the network and get distributed to software authors, but how do I convert Qbux into food and rent? Is the expectation that there'll be some kind of exchange set up where I'd periodically auction off my accumulated Qbux?

EGreg 3y ago

Well, I don't have all the answers for every industry, but the broad strokes as what I said. Utility tokens really only work when you need services of other people in a network, often requested and delivered over a network. They aren't really as useful for software that you can run locally on your computer. So, for example, hosting RedHat software on an Amazon instance, RedHat can work with Amazon to make sure it enforces licensing fees. If Amazon doesn't then RedHat can, theoretically, sue the company or pull its licensing for any further instances, hurting both companies. But RedHat could launch a new product line centering around servers running their machines, "commoditizing their complements", and doing jobs. Kind of like Adobe turned to SaaS instead of software running on your computer. Or how wordpress.com makes the bulk of the money for Automattic instead of self-hosted Wordpress. They'd have to start managing infrastructure, basically, or partner with Amazon as they already do. I guess my overall point is that more software should be funded in the beginning using utility tokens, so they never get a big shareholder class and thus never have to go IPO to generate a return. Thus they never have to impress investors on Wall Street earnings calls, by how many rents they've extracted from their ecosystem via greater enshittification.

tonyarkles 3y ago
Ahhh ok, I think that's where the wires got crossed. From your original post, I got the impression that you were suggesting that somehow RedHat's existing business model could be converted to using utility tokens and allow them to freely redistribute all of their RPM sources and build scripts without having their OS distribution cloned. I suppose my last question, having flipped around through the Qbix site a fair bit and grokking a bunch of the concepts of how it all fits together... I think I get how Qbux move around the network and get distributed to software authors, but how do I convert Qbux into food and rent? Is the expectation that there'll be some kind of exchange set up where I'd periodically auction off my accumulated Qbux?