Consortia used to be the standard means of collaborating between companies upon software development. Closed consortium software (gated communities) has a record of titanic failures (Taligent and Monterey intended to create a replacement for Unix, but Linux replaced them) and it is the wrong structure for the development of non-differentiating software. A consortium costs more because there are fewer members to share cost and risk than with an open source project and more structure and overhead as well.
