Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet

Blogs and social networks bolted on commenting apps like Disqus and showcased third-party photos from sites like Flickr. They did this all for free; no one asked for permission.

Blockchains are multiplayer.

How did open source take the world by storm? One of the main reasons the movement has been so successful is a feature of software known as composability.

They are most useful when they are not just multiplayer but massively multiplayer—in broad use across the internet.

Permissionless access removes gatekeepers and broadens who can contribute to the writing process.

Collaborative storytelling combines the lessons of Wikipedia with the power of credibly neutral, low take-rate blockchain networks that reward fans with ownership over their creations. The way this works most commonly in practice is that users receive tokens in proportion to their contribution to the narrative corpus. The resulting intellectual pro

Tech industry players responded by “moving up the stack,” focusing on services instead of software. A new buzzword—“software as a service,” or SaaS—soon took root.

Early delivery and ride-sharing apps hooked into Google Maps.

But another turn of the tech cycle would arrive, and as Microsoft grew more powerful, a sect of programmer activists struck back by forming the open-source software movement. As Tim O’Reilly, the tech publishing magnate, described the situation in his 1998 blog post “Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet,” “Despite all Microsoft’s efforts