What is the exact interplay between an open source developer community, it’s extented user ‘fan’ base, the eventual nonprofit institutional framework that supports it, and corporate sponsors and supporters? This is a key issue to understand how peer production and peer governance work in real practice, rather than in a idealized or ideological version.

We rarely refer to mainstream press reports in this blog, as we assume that you read them anyway, but the recent article in Business Week, sheds a lot of light on the topic above. It’s accompanied by a very interesting slideshow showing how the Firefox user base participated in viral marketing efforts.

A related interesting case study reports on the role of the Web in the Apple/Dell ‘flaming battery’ recall case.

These and other examples are also monitored in our Delicious tags on P2P-Marketing and P2P-Activism.