Everything is a Securities Offering
If you are the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, your job is essentially to manage a massive, global, decentralized logistics network where the cargo is “code” and the payment is “prestige” and “corporate stability.” It’s a delicate balance. You have to keep the tech giants from killing each other while ensuring that the plumbing of the entire internet—which is held together by three guys in Nebraska and some very stressed-out Europeans—doesn’t spring a leak.
But eventually, the gravity of modern finance pulls everything toward the same inevitable conclusion. If you have an ecosystem, you eventually want a coin.
So, Jim Zemlin is launching Zemlincoin.
The Proof-of-Governance Protocol
The fundamental problem with open-source software is that it is a “public good,” which in economic terms means “something everyone uses but nobody wants to pay for.” Jim’s brilliance over the years has been convincing billion-dollar companies that it is in their rational self-interest to pay him to make sure the software remains free. It’s a virtuoso performance in corporate diplomacy.
Zemlincoin ($ZMLN) is the logical evolution of this. Here is how it works:
The Jim Zemlin Premium
If you’ve met Jim, you know he has the specific energy of a man who has seen the source code of the world and decided that, with enough white papers and a well-catered board meeting, we can probably fix the bugs.
Launching a coin is a bold move for a guy who usually deals in the sober world of enterprise standards. But in the Levine-ian view of the world, Zemlincoin isn’t really a cryptocurrency. It’s a collateralized debt obligation on human ingenuity. Jim is effectively shorting the idea that developers will work for free forever and longing the idea that Microsoft and Google will eventually pay any price to avoid a git checkout from hell.
Is This a Security?
Of course it’s a security! It’s an investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of Jim Zemlin. The “enterprise” is the Linux kernel, and the “managerial effort” is Jim’s ability to wear a suit so comfortably that people forget he’s talking about software written by people who haven’t seen sunlight since 2014.
The SEC might have questions, but Jim has survived decades of licensing wars and the “Halloween Documents.” A few questions about “unregistered digital assets” are probably a relaxing Tuesday for him.