And listen to your customers. The Linux Alliance is a design collaborative, one of many Alliance b-Web variants. No one can force anyone to be part of an Alliance. It is difficult, sometimes impossible, to legally penalize anyone for breaking the rules - though social or marketplace penalties often work very well. In the industrial economy, Alliances were important but marginal, because barriers of time and space slowed them to a crawl.
Alliances now appear everywhere.
Millions flow daily into online communities, producing an unimaginable diversity of shared experiences from the sublime to the ridiculous. Also, most Alliances function as economies of sharing , wherein participants contribute help, information, work or some other good without expecting an immediate return. In the U.S., a group is starting work on open source textbooks for kindergarten through 12th grade. In the spirit of open source, the organizers began by asking potential supporters what systems they would like to put in place to assure quality and stimulate contributions. Imagine the open source spirit moving into the manufacturing arena.