Comment by ericholscher

Hey Dave,

Glad you're still doing cool things :)

Read the Docs is pretty much all open source, including the billing code (https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/blob/main/rea...), but we are structured like a normal company, with some custom bylaws that protect the OSS codebase if ownership changes hands. We haven't found anyone else setting up a competing instance or anything, but that might also be because the product is kind of niche.

I kinda love the idea of having people in the community that use the service have some kind of ownership over the platform. It would likely lead to longer term loyalty of the userbase, which would help keep the project sustainable and avoid the enshittification cycle.

We've played around with sharing ad revenue that we generate on documentation pages split with the projects, which is partially a win/win way of sharing in the upside of success.

Anyway, I don't have a great answer here, but wanted to say hi, and give a bit of context from our place in the world.

PS: You might also talk with the folks here: https://zebrasunite.coop/ -- they are structured like a co-op and mostly come from the tech/design community.