0a8e77e949
- Moved everything from ideas/passepartout/ to projects/passepartout/ - Moved legal structures to projects/flags/ - Created missing _index.org files for all subdirectories - Stripped redundant passepartout- prefix from filenames - Rewrote root _index.org as generalized brain index (projects + concepts) - Updated Hugo nav to Projects/Concepts - Updated build script section descriptions - Deleted stale ideas/passepartout-economics.md orphan
2.1 KiB
Competitive Moats
Re-evaluated: time is not the primary moat. A Phase 4+ 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):
- Domain-specific gate rules — thin. A few hundred lines of Lisp data. Write once, trivial to copy. Not a real moat.
- 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.
- Evaluation harness (regression suite) — thousands of test cases accumulated from every bug fix. Cannot be ingested from public data. Strongest residual moat.
- 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 verification monopoly on agent safety would change this calculus — competitors would need independent certification. Patent strategy and Licensing protect key innovations and create revenue from the open-source ecosystem.