9b2be10c77
Replace monolithic passepartout-economics.org with directory of org-roam style nodes, each with :ID: property and cross-references using [[id:uuid][title]] format. 27 nodes organized by theme: - Core: index, triad overview, agora, stoa - Revenue: verification appliance, domain gate packages, evaluation harness, skill marketplace, agora usernames, PDS service, compute marketplace - Strategy: investment thesis, moats, licensing, patents, AI industry impact - Analysis: lisp economics, sufficiency flip, time estimates, cost structure, gate rule encoding, upgrade lifecycle, biology parallels, symbolics comparison - Big money: verification monopoly, infrastructure lock-in Old file kept as archive with redirect links to new structure.
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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."
See also: Infrastructure lock-in, Verification monopoly, Evaluation harness, Patent strategy, Licensing