In his landmark 2004 book, The Success of Open Source, Stephen Weber describes open source as a "political economy," an experiment in social organization defined by a unique notion of property. Unlike conventional property rights, which are based on the right to exclude, open source is configured around the right to distribute.

For nearly fifty years, our industry has promulgated a false tension. We have positioned the "hackers" against the "suits," the community against the capital, and the ideal of abundance against the business imperative of scarcity. We have treated these two rights—distribution and exclusion—as natural enemies. But must they be?

The Commercial Open Source Startup Alliance (COSSA) is the answer to that question. We are engineering a broader political economy where the right to distribute and the right to exclude are not enemies, but gear-teeth in a single, high-performance engine. We are moving open source from a counterintuitive social experiment to a disciplined, investable asset class.

The End of the "Charity" Narrative

For too long, the venture community has viewed open source through a lens of fascination and fear. We acknowledge the massive distribution power of the model, yet inside boardrooms, it is often still treated as "digital charity"—a thankless public good that is perpetually at odds with the demands of a P&L. We have viewed the successes of Red Hat, Databricks, and HashiCorp as outliers, reliant on the singular genius of a founder to navigate the treacherous gap between community love and enterprise revenue.

That era is over. The State of Commercial Open Source 2025 report has replaced that mythology with math. The data proves that Commercial Open Source (COSS) is not just a viable strategy; it is empirically the premier sector in the software economy. COSS companies achieve 7x higher valuations at IPO and 14x at M&A compared to their proprietary peers. They graduate from Seed to Series A at nearly double the rate of closed-source startups.

However, a high-performing sector is not the same thing as an asset class. An asset class has standardized metrics, predictable governance, and structured liquidity. Right now, COSS is a gold mine without a map. We are operating in a pre-2005 SaaS world—a landscape of massive potential but zero standardization, where we guess at valuations based on "vibes" and GitHub stars rather than rigorous unit economics.

COSSA was built to capture this arbitrage opportunity. We are doing for COSS exactly what the SaaStr ecosystem did for subscription software: we are defining the "physics" of the business model. Where SaaS has Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), we are adding "Project Criticality." Where SaaS has churn, we are also measuring "Maintainer Velocity". We are turning the "wild west" into a science.

Reconciling Exclusion and Distribution

To build this asset class, we must resolve the conflict highlighted in Weber’s original text. We must reconcile the right to distribute with the right to exclude.

Historically, founders struggled because they lacked a framework to balance these rights. They often gave away too much, starving the business, or locked down too much, starving the community. COSSA resolves this by creating a structural "container" for both.

Through mechanisms like the Certified COSS™ Framework, we are establishing a clear boundary. We give founders a framework to define and communicate exactly which parts of the asset are for distribution—the core project, the community driver, the innovation engine—and which parts utilize exclusion—the enterprise features, cloud services, and indemnification that customers pay for.

In the COSSA model, the "right to distribute" becomes the most efficient marketing and R&D engine in history. It drives ubiquitous adoption and commoditizes the competition. The "right to exclude" then captures a portion of that massive value to sustain the entity. This isn't a contradiction; it is a symbiosis. By creating the legal and structural standards to manage this, we de-risk the investment for capital allocators and preserve the open ethos for builders.

Evolving Governance

Historically, we offered founders a binary choice: retain absolute control and risk trust (the dictator model), or hand over your crown jewels to a foundation designed for your competitors (the "Switzerland" model). The latter is often viewed as corporate suicide for an early-stage company. Founders need a launchpad, not a graduation hall.

COSSA introduces the necessary evolution. We are replacing the governance "cliff" with a Milestone-Based Curation ramp.

Governance shouldn't be an irreversible decision made on Day 1; it should be a journey. Through "conditioned rights transfers," control shifts gradually from the company to the community as the project hits specific maturity milestones. We allow founders to retain the agility they need to iterate on product-market fit in the early days, while committing to a roadmap of neutralization that protects the community eventually. We call this process curing. Its purpose is to help a startup achieve a stable state where the commercial business and the open source community are thriving and balanced.

To operationalize this, we have introduced the Certified COSS™designation.

Think of this as the "GAAP" standard for open source governance. The Certified COSS mark signals to the market that a company adheres to the COSS Covenant™—a legal framework that creates a firewall between capital and code. It formalizes shared commitments regarding governance, IP, and the boundary between the free "core" and the commercial "value-add".

Crucially, to maintain the integrity of this asset class, we enforce a strict separation of powers. While our Investor Council provides critical market signals on what makes a company investable, they do not vote on the certification standards. Ratification is held by an independent Technical Steering Committee. This ensures the "Certified" mark remains a trusted, neutral signal of quality that prevents "rug-pulls" and protects the ecosystem from capture.

For investors, this certification de-risks the asset. For talent, it signals a safe place to build. For founders, it preserves optionality while building trust.

Support Structures

In construct, COSSA is introducing new organizational structures to help founders and investors build this new asset class. These include:

These structures do not just coordinate code; they coordinate the incentives of capitalists and hackers simultaneously, ensuring that the influx of capital strengthens the social fabric rather than tearing it apart.

Sustainable Value Creation: The Flywheel

Weber calls open source as a "system of sustainable value creation". But the reality of Open Source v1.0 has often been the "Tragedy of the Commons." We have seen critical infrastructure—the digital roads and bridges of the modern economy—maintained by underfunded volunteers, creating massive systemic risk. That is not sustainable.

For value creation to be truly sustainable, it must be commercial.

At COSSA, we argue that the only way to protect the "distribution" side of the equation is to monetize the "exclusion" side, but we also introduce the concept of recycling the wealth. This is the purpose of the Fulcrum Fund. This donor-driven endowment is designed to take appreciated stock from successful COSS exits and reinvest it into the ecosystem's "plumbing".

This completes the loop. The commercial success of the application layers funds the ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure layers. It transforms open source from an extractive model into a regenerative one.

The Broader Political Economy

So, what does a broader version of this political economy look like?

It looks like a world where open source is no longer a counterintuitive notion, but the default setting for software innovation. It looks like a market where founders don't have to choose between their principles and their profits. It looks like an ecosystem where the right to distribute builds the world, and the right to exclude sustains the builders.

COSSA is not a trade association. We are a market-making entity engineered to stabilize and monetize a $26.4 billion sector. We are answering the question posed thirty years ago by proving that when you align the incentives of community and capital, you don't just get better software—you get a better economy.

The debate is over. The math has replaced the mythology. The asset class is being engineered right now.

Let’s build.