I think Macro is making a huge error in deciding not to license out the Magazine code to others. He has shown the way, and I'd like to see him lead forward.

If he licensed it to a smart political editor of the Obviously Correct persuasion who would commission stories for me to read, I'd subscribe.

He's right that a gazillion clones is a Bad Thing. He should instead license it to serious editors only, and have a family of The Magazines each with a different focus. In order to enforce quality, he should only provide annual licenses to a few serious editors at a time, and then discontinue them if he feels the customers are getting a bad deal. He should start small: one magazine at first, then add on fast as he can while maintaining quality.

In other words, the path to Quality for this type of thing is for him to retain control (and a bit of profit) rather than his current path of unintentionally encouraging others to clone his app badly.

What he seems to be saying is that it's all in the editorial decisions he's made, and the quality of writing and other content in "The Magazine". If this is really the case, he should totally license out the code, or release it open source. He's saying that what differentiates "The Magazine" is not the app, but the publication. If this is the case, then there is no problem with letting other people use his platform to do what they will.

"This is essentially what every successful founder thinks before they end up starting a billion dollar company"

This is also what an enumerable number of failed founders think as well. Shipping is the important portion of your quote - not the deprecating position about one's relative importance to an industry/cause.

Sure, but it's clear at this point that Marco knows how to ship and does it well.

So you're saying Drew Houston built Dropbox simply because he thought it'd be neat, but didn't care about whether it would change how people sync and share files, and didn't know anything about the industry either?

"Eat your own dogfood" and "scratch your own itch" have always been good mottos... but they're not the secret sauce to success.