I mean a full-fledged business including product development, management, HR, sales & marketing & profit sharing.<p>Open source has created some amazing systems & applications, some more complex than your standard business model.<p>I don't see any reason why a business couldn't be built up to produce and sell software or a subscription web app.<p>Is this possible? What would be the challenges? What would it take to build the infrastructure to support this? Anyone interesting in discussing this offline in more detail?
It must be possible: there are businesses built around selling open source systems.<p>However, I personally don't see it as a particularly attractive business model. On the one hand, by "crowd-sourcing", I imagine you mean "farming out development work to unpaid volunteers". On the other hand, you'd need to have some kind of built-in reason why paying customers should pay you, instead of just using the (freely available) open source themselves.<p>Let's turn the question around: why would you <i>want</i> to try to "build a business to produce and sell software or a subscription web app" that is open source?