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.

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.