Franchising Open Source

Another thought as I slept through the last few pages of Porter's "business school classic." (This just confirms to me that I made the right decision in going to law school instead of b-school: at least the law is intentionally boring.)

Anyway, the thought: why hasn't someone brought franchising to the open source world? That is, offer a blanket organization through which small-scale developers/service organizations can do what they want (write great code) while having a larger organization do the dirt work? Dell clearly sees franchising services as an opportunity in the generic enterprise services business, with $4B in top-line services revenue, but the idea has at least as much merit in the open source world. Highly fragmented into diverse projects, a franchise model offers an open source vendor the opportunity to create mass; to create scale.

Maybe this is what Spikesource, SourceLabs, and others like them should be looking to do. Maybe they already are. I would assume that a fair number of open source contributors would like to be paid for their contributions, but reject the idea of working for BigCo, thereby sacrificing independence. They also may find it difficult to sell their services around a particular project to enterprises that prefer dealing with large, established brands.

Franchising offers a way around this by allowing small-scale developers to work under the auspices of a larger, blanket organization. That organization holds its franchisees to quality standards, and then collects a portion of the franchisees' fees in return for assuming the burden of running marketing campaigns, taking care of accounting/legal/infrastructure/etc., and sales.

Thoughts?