I‘m not aware of any software company organised this way though. Wouldn’t it make sense for a company like Red Hat or Cannonical - FOSS based service companies?
It's an interesting question. It'd certainly be an odd cooperative.
Most cooperatives have a large number of members with roughly equal economic power. So, ideas like one-member-one-vote and equal income distribution make sense.
However, in the case of companies requiring FOSS services, I imagine the most valuable customers would be large corporations working in highly risk averse industries like telecommunications and banking that feel the 'need' for a support contract to go along with their linux distribution.
But there would likely be a mix of large blue-chip companies, smaller service suppliers to the aforementioned companies, and other companies that want to leverage services beyond consulting like Red Hat's managed OpenShift offerings.
So our FOSS cooperative membership distribution would probably be heavily weighted towards smaller companies, but most of the revenue would come from the long tail.
I don't see how the small cadre contributing the majority of the revenue would be satisfied having effectively zero voting power. So you might have to mix up the model a bit to assign voting power on the basis of revenue contributed or some proxy like the number of contracts signed.
I think it's close to the way the Apache Foundation or the CNCF operate. In fact, at one point, US life insurers that operated as mutual organizations did make an argument they should be classified as non-profits and not have to pay income tax, but that didn't seem to work.
m_mueller|3 years ago
scoopertrooper|3 years ago
Most cooperatives have a large number of members with roughly equal economic power. So, ideas like one-member-one-vote and equal income distribution make sense.
However, in the case of companies requiring FOSS services, I imagine the most valuable customers would be large corporations working in highly risk averse industries like telecommunications and banking that feel the 'need' for a support contract to go along with their linux distribution.
But there would likely be a mix of large blue-chip companies, smaller service suppliers to the aforementioned companies, and other companies that want to leverage services beyond consulting like Red Hat's managed OpenShift offerings.
So our FOSS cooperative membership distribution would probably be heavily weighted towards smaller companies, but most of the revenue would come from the long tail.
I don't see how the small cadre contributing the majority of the revenue would be satisfied having effectively zero voting power. So you might have to mix up the model a bit to assign voting power on the basis of revenue contributed or some proxy like the number of contracts signed.
nonameiguess|3 years ago
lokedhs|3 years ago
The company itself was created by their customers to ensure support and development of the product that they used.
cwzwarich|3 years ago