You might be right, in the "more than 50% of the time" sense of "tends to", but this kind of generalization is not really prescriptive at all. I could easily rattle off dozens of cases where "committee efforts" beat commercial efforts (linux, webkit, TCP/IP, ARM, DNS, yada yada yada).

On second thought, if you go by percentage of operations handled by, say, your cell phone, I wouldn't be surprised if more than 50% of those ops are "committee efforts".

Identi.ca isn't exactly a committee effort though. The vast majority of development comes from Status.net, which makes money (apparently) by selling/setting up private instances for enterprise usage.

I'm not sure the two are mutually exclusive there. Commercial doesn't negate committees (I've been involved in a fair few), and open source doesn't have to be a committee effort.

I blogged about the problem as I perceive it with existing efforts - they always touted themselves as 'the open source version' and most non-developers and non-technologists don't care about that.

They care if it's easy to use and has reached critical mass amongst their networks.