There's several ways to do it:
- incorporate
- foundation (a subtype of incorporating)
- government
- cooperatives
The trouble with corporations is that they do have interests that are very independent of their customers and they are not good agents (principle-agent problem). RedHat, partly because they could not figure out better ways to monetize, has increasingly fought gadgets with gadgets, creating service contracts for support interfaces for open-core products and so on. This does not maximize the value delivery of open solutions.
Government is not known for speed or efficiency. Good luck getting the average Joe to understand why your little git repo needs to come out of his payroll. Even if you get something passed, now all Joe hears on the radio is about how you're stealing his paycheck. Less learned: narrow interests are easy political targets. Okay so let's do a foundation!
So how about foundations? Every single git repo needs a foundation? That's a lot of overhead. Foundations have a scope. They can also suffer from principle agent problems. Foundations are a good solution, but they themselves have not really adapted to the information age. Rigid, self-serving governance can easily become entrenched by insiders who beat the drum while cashing checks.
PrizeForge solve a lot of these problems just by being very broad in scope and very neutral as far as interests. More payment is better. If the market wins, we win. We don't really have to care who or why but we should try to protect customer value by making money smarter and creating the means of coordination so that nobody moves alone.
PrizeForge is not good yet. But it will be. Our solution for the principle-agent problems will completely change how we do social. To start, we've started operating our fund-matching systems. Those will help us bootstrap faster. We can serve some of the communities we know well while building up the rest of our features. (Log in after a few hours, I'm currently doing maintenance).