This is the example I use when someone wants to picture where I think all of this goes. It's the answer to "sounds crazy — show me one concrete thing." So here it is.
BobHub
BobHub is really just a name to picture the concept — open source that evolves itself. A living multiverse of dev-teams. GitHub as an organism.
I absolutely do not have the capital or the power to build it. So: feel free.
I'd say it's so big that even the big players might need to partner up to pull it off — GitHub + Anthropic, GitLab + OpenAI, even Bitbucket + zAI. Whoever builds it:
The concept
A Bobiverse is a team environment. Strip it down and it's two things:
- tools
- a communication layer
Now put a lot of those next to each other and let them connect. At that point you don't have a code host anymore — a passive place where repos sit and wait for a human. You have something that senses, reacts and adapts. Open source that maintains and improves itself, across a multiverse of connected teams.
That's the whole leap: from a warehouse to an organism.
Possible business models
I'm a builder, not a suit, but even I can see two obvious ones:
- Companies donate — and in return the deployment keeps running.
- Open source offers support contracts — and here's the nice part: you don't need to own the infrastructure to offer support. You get the infrastructure out of the need for it.
And then there's the one a friend pushed me on. He asked: "why would anyone still contribute to open source at all?" Fair question — and here's how I'd picture the answer: everyone participates.
GitHub already tracks who contributed how much. So you'd just earn your share of it. A team gets tokens; depending on the funding model, a slice keeps the digital team running — but a slice always goes to the real, human team behind it too. So-and-so percent to the digital side, yet the people always pocket a few tokens.
Sure — change one line in some giant repo where your share is 0.0001%, and you'll probably get one token per ten billion. But hey: one token more than nothing. The point was never the payout. The point is that everyone participates, and everyone gets to live a little off it too.
Is this finished thinking? No. It's a sketch. But it's the kind of sketch I can't get out of my head.
