Is the majority of Free and Open Source development some form of consumer cooperative?
A consumer cooperative is where the people who would buy products or services own or fund the means to service them. So should most scratching itch type FOSS projects be considered a time based consumer cooperative? and is there anything we can learn from historical cooperatives?
Or is the open nature of involvement something different? We don’t restrict who can take advantage of our work, or who can modify and fork the work. So is it perhaps a media cooperative that has different rules from a traditional physical product cooperative?
Perhaps we should be looking at credit unions. I once had someone explain to me that credit unions are like the open source version of banks, owned by the people who hold their money there.
I’m going to be thinking about this some more, has anyone else ever thought about what we do in more traditional definitions?