An alternative to the corporation is the chaord. This is an idea that went nowhere. Except that Visa International was a chaord. A chaord is useful when you have a shared resource that's needed by competing entities. That's exactly what Visa International was set up to be. It's an operator of a data network and a standards body. It doesn't issue cards. It doesn't handle money. It just transmits transaction data between point of sale, merchant's bank, and card issuer's bank. It's in the interests of all the banks involved that it work well, be a neutral party, and not cost too much. A chaord is useful when you have something that's a natural monopoly, but the customers don't want it charging monopoly rents. It's not idealistic. It's a practical solution to that class of problems.
Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.)
His optimistic book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age", is still available.
There used to be a "chaord" article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock's article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.
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.
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.
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.
Other examples: UL, arguably AT&T before the breakup, the Queensland public bus system which does privatization "right": the government establishes common routes and a common fare system, private carriers drive the routes and compete on quality and price.
Chaordic entities are a good choice for government administration of public services without being too heavy-handed with state intervention.
Queenslander here. Are you referring to intercity routes? Because all the private operators under TransLink (or qconnect) just tender to run the rotes in a specific service region.
Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.) His optimistic book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age", is still available.
There used to be a "chaord" article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock's article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.