The open source meritocracy model - move it to the systems/solutions level

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt do a wonderful job of describing the opensource ecosystem, identifying key motivators and practices that make it work. The mix of capitalism and communism, through meritocracy and community, provides an interesting balance.
Adopting some of these practices in commercial product development makes good sense and has been successfully demonstrated by the agile community. Going further I would like to see the same open practices applied higher up the food chain, in systems or solutions development. The move up the food chain is already occurring with open source in the web and application development arena, projects like ruby on rails and spring are taking on more and more of the infrastructure tasks of the developer. More solution oriented projects are also gaining traction in the CRM space.

An open solution oriented approach need to be limited to open source. Building open solutions with commodity components is also a possibility. Once the key capabilities of the commodity are identified and well understood, opening up the ways in which these capabilities can be used and reused in different configurations and contexts could provided a valuable community resource. Taking from the cluetrain mantra

#39 The community of discourse is the market

the community can determine the net value of a commodity, the appropriate level of functionality and the appropriate life span. Systems can be build from software that is proven, by the market, to be fit for a purpose. The meritocracy would reveal its self as best practice, the community would facilitate the diffusion of knowledge to allow the replication and ongoing maintenance of open working systems. It could be a powerful force in the reduction of technology churn that plagues aspects of the application portfolio.