Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

by Don Tapscott

Peer production communities can be “commons-based peer production,” a phrase coined by Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler.18 Sometimes called social production, also Benkler’s term, this system means that goods and services are produced outside the bounds of the private sector and are not “owned” by a corporation or individual. Among the countless examples are the Linux operating system (owned by no one but now the most important operating system in the world), Wikipedia (owned by the Wikimedia Foundation), and the Firefox Web browser (owned by the Mozilla Foundation). Peer production can also refer to activities in the private sector where peers collaborate socially to produce something but the good is not socially owned. Peer production as a business model matters for two reasons. First, sometimes peers collaborate voluntarily to produce goods and services where a corporation acts as curator and achieves commercial benefit. Readers create the content on the Reddit discussion platform, but they don’t own it. Reddit is the tenth-biggest site in the United States in terms of traffic. Second, companies can tap into vast pools of external labor. IBM embraced Linux and donated hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of software to the Linux community. In doing so, IBM saved $900 million a year developing its own proprietary systems and created a platform on which it built a multibillion-dollar software and services business.