Yes, MkDocs is an example of someone that's using a platform to good advantage. But the advantage they are using it for is to sell an excludable good: "new features are first exclusively released to sponsors."[1] Nothing wrong with that, but this constitutes "jumping through hoops" according to the view laid out in my post. Can we get to no hoops? That's the intriguing challenge!

[1] https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/

> it will still suffer from the 'tragedy of the commons'.

Fortunately, we have lots of great research on how to avoid tragedies of the commons:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521405998

I aim to explain how this applies to Open Source in a future post, which I'm tracking here:

https://github.com/chadwhitacre/openpath/issues/14

I'm not adventured, nor do I care to give my opinion on the issue, but two proposed solutions are:

1) Fixing the commons by eliminating them - grant property rights to the users which align their incentives with a longer-term health of the "thing" and allow markets to emerge.

Free Market Environmentalism has a few examples of this working in the real world: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Market-Environmentalism-Terry-And...

2) Allow local communities to form their own rules on how to manage their own resources, and monitor each other.

Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom (winner of the "Nobel in Economics" by her life-long work on these issues) has empirical data of cases from Kenya to LA: http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutio...

There is a body of literature on the subject how self governing groups escape the tragedy of the commons. For example: http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutio...

This is all empirical studies.

Some more recent work questions whether there was ever an actual "tragedy" of the commons, in an empirical sense of having happened in reality, as opposed to as a game-theory thought experiment. The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics went to Elinor Ostrom's contrary work on the subject, e.g.: http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutio...