The Steem economic model is a very simple one. A slowly and steadily decreasing token inflation generates newly minted STEEM and SBD as well as dilutes existing stake by generating Vests. The community rewards whatever it regards as valuable with new tokens. There is no debt. Instead, delegating Steem Power is the way to fund projects. Because there is no debt, no nobody can default on a debt and potentially trigger a systemic crisis of catastrophic destruction of liquidity. The blockchain will always keep generating tokens like clockwork.
Intellectual property, closed source code and software development are not a natural match. The best way to create software is to do it as a collaborative and evolutionary process. Often, the most elegant solutions escape a single developer or a group of developers. In case of differences of vision, copyright free code is free to be forked. No red tape hindering progress at any stage. And the more eyes there are on a piece of source code, the more likely it is that critical errors can be detected before employing the code in production.
There is a lot of free software in the world already but what's new is how the Steem economic model combines community-driven monetary incentives with the creation of copyright free software. The way the Steem developer community has picked up the pieces where the economic woes of Steemit Inc left them having to put SMTs on hold indefinitely is nothing short of fantastic. Steemit Inc is forced to shelf SMTs for the time being. Fine. The community creates several working alternatives in a breeze. The lack of bottlenecks that we're seeing now is quite confidence inspiring.