I read an interesting whitepaper this morning from the Collaborative Software Initiative. It describes CSI's cooperative software(sm) model which leverages open source and cooperative development to help businesses save money and reduce development time. They focus on applications they define as contextual. These are applications that are critical to a particular vertical but don't represent a competitive advantage. For these applications CSI is helping businesses work together and build a sustainable community to ensure the longevity of the contextual applications.

A few years ago when Stuart Cohen, CSI's CEO, was the CEO at the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) I spent some time with him talking about the community source model that Sakai and Kuali leverage to do what CSI is doing in the Education vertical. It's very interesting to see the model abstracted and applied the way they are.