4 ms·

There’s also the cooperative. Here in Switzerland they are rather popular - some of the biggest banks, insurances and property owners, and more notably, the two

There’s also the cooperative. Here in Switzerland they are rather popular - some of the biggest banks, insurances and property owners, and more notably, the two largest supermarket chains (making up >80% of food / non food market) are organised this way. Your customers could be part of the ownership structure of your company, which creates a strong loyalty effect and a focus on organic & vertical growth rather than growth just for the sake of beating quarterly numbers.

p33p 4y ago
These are called mutual companies in the US — at least insurance — New York Life, Northwestern Mutual, MassMutual, etc
- m_mueller 4y ago
  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?
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    I think Dyalog was at least created that way. I don't know if they are an actual cooperative though. The company itself was created by their customers to ensure support and development of the product that they used.
  - scoopertrooper 4y ago
    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.
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    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.
  - cwzwarich 4y ago
    One of the most well known is Igalia: https://www.igalia.com https://www.igalia.com
rrishi 4y ago
India also has quite a lot of notable cooperatives. One of the most famous one is Amul which is world's largest producer of milk. There are others that are pretty sizable too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_movement_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_movement_in_India

p33p 4y ago

These are called mutual companies in the US — at least insurance — New York Life, Northwestern Mutual, MassMutual, etc

m_mueller 4y ago
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?
- lokedhs 4y ago
  I think Dyalog was at least created that way. I don't know if they are an actual cooperative though. The company itself was created by their customers to ensure support and development of the product that they used.
- scoopertrooper 4y ago
  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.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  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.
- cwzwarich 4y ago
  One of the most well known is Igalia: https://www.igalia.com https://www.igalia.com

rrishi 4y ago

India also has quite a lot of notable cooperatives. One of the most famous one is Amul which is world's largest producer of milk. There are others that are pretty sizable too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_movement_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_movement_in_India