Concrete example of how returns are allocated?

Clark - the attached book chapter describes two real cases (do not redistribute beyond the membership of this forum as it is not due for publication until early next year). @grahamboyd @eric13 @robjameson - the subjects of this book chapter - are also members of this forum. You can ask them direct questions.

Also, you may find the FairShares Wiki helpful - particularly http://www.fairshares.coop/wiki/index.php?title=Investor_Share

If you want to experiment with allocations of surplus, you can prepare 'trial' and 'draft' rules using this website:

https://sites.google.com/view/fairsharesrules

@clarkcevans where are you from? We're in the USA.

@robjameson I'm in Chicago. I moved here because my wife is professor of Art History at U.Chicago. Currently, I'm trying to organize a consumer cooperative (software owned by users, e.g. physicians, researchers) to build medical research software and then perhaps eventually an electronic health records system. In this space, I think that free software (open source) has not succeeded since it's hard to grow a company when your consulting/hosting/support profits are diverted to build products. Also, I've found most in the medical field don't know/understand open source, but do (since they are members) understand associations that they are members (AMA, and dozens of care specific associations). Therefore, I think, free software license (open source) isn't a requirement for maintaining user freedom, so long as the users collectively own the works they adopt and share with their colleagues. Cheers!

@clarkcevans ... Great to hear more about what you're doing. I have had a similar experience with open source, the financials of it, and it not being understood by non-developers.

Actually, to address the $$ problem, I've drafted the first reciprocity-based Open Source license. Basically, is says that if you make $ from someones open source project, you should make a financial contribution (self-assessed) back. This amount of money (or lack of it) will be shown publicly on a ledger.

I wrote it out of necessity, b/c the GPL 3 vs MIT vs other big licenses were all missing the $ piece. It has not been officially recognized by the Open Source Initiative yet (the group that basically says it's legit), but I'm working towards that. I'm looking for more feedback first.

It fits well w/ FairShares' stance on IP and creative commons .... I hope it'll serve as the missing piece for licensing code (which creative commons licenses aren't usually used for)

You can check it here: https://github.com/anyshare/PEARL

@clarkcevans - it may be worth speaking with the team over in savvy.coop. They are taking a patient-centric approach, but something you might be interested in...