:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED:  [2026-05-24 Sun]
:ID:       aa6d062e-a520-5d14-8773-00687ed9c689
:END:
#+title: Competitive Moats
#+filetags: :passepartout:economics:moats:competition:

Re-evaluated: time is not the primary moat. A Phase 4+ [[id:28c46769-c14b-42aa-ac7a-69d310157f8f][Passepartout]] fed on Wikipedia + Wikidata can build a general ontology in two weeks. The organic growth advantage collapses for general knowledge.

**Actual moats (weaker than initially assumed):**
1. **Domain-specific gate rules** — thin. A few hundred lines of Lisp data. Write once, trivial to copy. Not a real moat.
2. **Empirical decision history** — every HITL decision is a Merkle fact. A fresh instance has none. Makes *your* instance more valuable but doesn't prevent competition — it's a switching cost, not a barrier to entry.
3. **[[id:45258a2d-1675-562c-9024-5d1eb2f1ea56][Evaluation harness (regression suite)]]** — thousands of test cases accumulated from every bug fix. Cannot be ingested from public data. Strongest residual moat.
4. **[[id:2f783eb4-638e-5afa-9b59-6224d086a712][Infrastructure integration]]** — specific Docker compose layouts, Traefik patterns, Authentik configs encoded as gate rules. A competitor's infrastructure is different.

**Strongest competitor strategy:** Not copying your gate rules — offering the same architecture as a service with their own pre-seeded general knowledge and a consulting engagement to customize gate rules. The AGPL prevents closing the architecture but does not prevent offering it as a service with a customization layer.

**The defensible business is services, not product.** The defensible entity is "the organization that best understands how to adapt Passepartout to your domain" — not "the organization that owns Passepartout." A [[id:827bc546-e887-5b7c-9b65-6392beaf0920][verification monopoly]] on agent safety would change this calculus — competitors would need independent certification. [[id:caaeee11-ba6f-5566-aecd-f171b4c459c0][Patent strategy]] and [[id:67faf52f-9126-50a7-b87e-2bedc610dac7][Licensing]] protect key innovations and create revenue from the open-source ecosystem.