The co-op business model: share whatever you've got

Entrepreneurs: “Looking for a loophole, since 1532.”™ ☺

no, its real. and its a great way to test whether you have something with commercial value and build a userbase

It sounds like you're implying:

a) This strategy (the co-op model) is overwhelmingly likely to fail b) But every once in a great while, it will succeed c) And some random fluke for whom it succeeded will think it's a great idea and write a blog post like this one, so d) The existence of this blog post is not strong evidence against a)

However, given this scenario, we would expect the distribution of S (number of successful projects a given person started under the co-op model) to be heavily peaked at 0, with a few outliers at 1, and falling to ~0 at 2. This author has started three successful projects under the co-op model, suggesting that this is not just survivor bias -- the right sort of person can, at least occasionally, find success under this model.

Not sure. He did it repeatedly. Of course to give it some more weight we should also look at some "non-survivors" but I'd want to see some that got to step 3 in his advice (monetize.)

There are some companies that monetized (more or less successfully) what they shared for free but I don't know enough of them to draw any conclusions.

I do think it ups your odds of receiving back, though a tricky thing I've been trying to sort out is how much it also matters that you actively try to "own" it, so as to capture some of the rebound value.

For example, I sometimes have trouble deciding between writing up an explanation of something as a blog post, versus starting or adding to its Wikipedia article. If I'm being honest, I think the Wikipedia option often provides the most value to the world at large: my contribution will be found/read by more people there, can be improved upon by others to snowball into even more usefulness, etc. But I would probably capture more of the value if I blogged it, because that'd build my personal brand, could generate AdSense/Amazon revenue, etc., while it's harder (though not impossible) to parlay being a respected Wikipedia editor into any sort of benefit.