---
title: "The Secrets to Building Vibrant Communities in Web3 Open-Source"
description: "Discover how Web3 open-source projects like Arbitrum ($20B) are revolutionizing community licensing, governance, and value creation in tech startups."
categories: ["office hours","web3","engineering"]
keywords: ["Arbitrum","Community Source license","open-source software","Web3","community governance","developer relations","SaaS","technology startups","value creation"]
ai_summary: "Explore how Arbitrum's Community Source license fosters vibrant communities in Web3 open-source projects."
date: 2024-02-25
lastmod: 2026-07-21
canonical_url: https://www.tomtunguz.com/building-communities-at-scale/
author: "Tomasz Tunguz"
---

{{< youtube AqjJ1RgDlxg >}}

The Community Source licenses may be the future of open source software. 


With closed-source software, the code isn't shared outside the company that wrote it.  Open-source code is freely available to examine & use. Open-source companies like Elastic ($13b), Confluent ($10b), MongoDB ($33b) have been phenomenally successful. 

Along the way, [many of them have changed their licenses](https://tomtunguz.com/evolution-of-open-source-business-models/) to shield themselves from copycats. 

[Arbitrum](https://arbitrum.io/), an open source project with 1m Twitter followers & worth about $20b, implemented a "Community Source" license with these key features : 

- anyone using the code must contribute to the community in some positive way 
- the community members vote to approve a license to someone using the technology to build a similar commercial offering 
- the community members carry proof of their membership with a token who value increases as the project succeeds 
- the community manages a treasury & votes on which initiatives to fund

Today, more than [300k people belong to the community](https://snapshot.org/#/arbitrumfoundation.eth). They vote on technical roadmap, compensation, & their own operations, governed by this license & manage a treasury with $3b of assets.<sup>1</sup> 

During Office Hours on Friday, [Steven Goldfeder, founder & CEO of [Arbitrum](https://arbitrum.io/), explained these benefits of the Community Source license.

In addition, Steven shared the principle guiding the building of Arbitrum's vibrant community : all developers are treated equally whether their projects originated from the titans of the space or a two-person team.

Arbitrum today captures about 50% of marketshare in its space across three products that enable developers to select the best chain for their purpose : the original Arbitrum Rollup Chain that accerelates Ethereum transactions, Arbitrum Nova which is designed for games & social applications, & Arbitrum Orbit, which enables developers to customize chains to their needs.

Steven's perspective on the future of web3, the deliberate developer relations strategy, & [the Community Source license can be found here.](https://youtu.be/AqjJ1RgDlxg)

Thank you for joining us & sharing your insights, Steven!


---
<sup>1</sup> The Community Source license is implemented as a [Business Source License]( https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro/blob/master/LICENSE.md) with the governance clauses mentioned above & some others.