readthedocs.org

Hey Dave, Glad you're still doing cool things :) Read the Docs is pretty much all open source, including the billing code (https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/blob/main/rea...), but we are structured like a normal company, with some custom bylaws that protect the OSS codebase if ownership changes hands. We haven't found anyone else setting up a competing instance or anything, but that might also be because the product is kind of niche. I kinda love the idea of having people in the community that use the service have some kind of ownership over the platform. It would likely lead to longer term loyalty of the userbase, which would help keep the project sustainable and avoid the enshittification cycle. We've played around with sharing ad revenue that we generate on documentation pages split with the projects, which is partially a

They are using this infrastructure as the moat. ReadTheDocs is also doing the same thing. Deploy if you dare: https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org

I should be more specific about what I meant. I would like to see tox support `install_commands` (https://github.com/tox-dev/tox/issues/715) I would like to see pex support the `build-system` feature. (https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex/issues/660) For pip, I'm not sure what's involved in getting everything to work generically. This is probably not simple. It has the consequence that when we don't have control over the install command, we end up needing hacks like using `extras` for ReadTheDocs (e.g. https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/issues/4912#i...)