I started thinking about it, Bitshares isn't a stock or ownership over the company that is writing this software, right?

And it doesn't have any revenue stream associated with it. Right? The delegates are the ones who get paid, right?

I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm just trying to figure it out, what gives BitShares value?

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In a sense bitshares do give you partial ownership over "the company that is writing this software" because you have the ability to vote for them.  Shareholders have the ability to vote other people or companies into (or out of) developer positions and pay them. As for its value, the more people that use things like bitassets (backed by bitshares), the more shares there are that are locked up in collateral.  By buying bitshares you are saying you think more people are going to use the technology, and therefore more bitshares will be needed to account for the rise in demand for bitassets (aka it will profit you to issue a bitasset). When you issue a bitasset you will receive a sweet revenue stream of transaction fees. So it may not be a stock in the traditional sense, but you actually do have all of those wonderful characteristics. I'm not a developer or anything so someone let me know if I got something wrong. Hope it helps!

I don't really post anything but I like to read the posts on here every day. So, for my first post I have a few thoughts I'd like to share on what new features we could create proposals for when DPOS 2.0 comes out.  I came across these businesses who's concepts I thought would be perfect for bitshares. The first seems relatively simple to do because everyone personally knows each other. This is puddle, a microcredit system based entirely on trust between friends.  If we could create a proposal for some sort of on-blockchain p2p credit system like this, it would be great for bitshares adoption.  To go along with the "uber for everything" trend in journalism, we would no doubt become the uber of finance.
https://www.puddle.com

This one seems to be using ripple as a platform with bitcoin as an option.  They are trying to create a decentralized credit union which is an interesting concept I'm going to be following.  It seems similar to the way puddle works but with integration of existing institutions (with ripple) and credit scores so it would be much larger than a group of friends. Harder to integrate but they are creating it for blockchains so I thought I would mention it.
http://moneycircles.com

Just some thoughts on what we might want to propose when DPOS 2.0 comes out.  I realize we probably have many other aspects that are more in need of immediate attention, but I would love to see a similar feature implemented into bitshares.  It would allow the community to open up capital to each other, borrowing and lending to fund more development of businesses in our ecosystem and much more. I think we can do much better than ripple in this area for obvious reasons (collateralized assets, profitability, paying workers via blockchain, etc. etc.). Any thoughts?