"We're relative novices in the whole open-source area," says Mike Thyken, senior vice president and CIO at bedding manufacturer and Avalanche member Select Comfort Corp. "We started looking at everything it was going to take to get a Linux/open-source world put together, and we saw that it was very redundant between companies."

So Select Comfort joined Avalanche, contributing a membership fee of $30,000 as well as some time from technical architecture experts inside the company to Avalanche's Linux reference environment project. As a result, Select Comfort expected to receive deliverables on a Linux desktop and server architecture early in 2005, all for a "fairly modest" investment of money and time, Thyken says -- far less than if the company had attempted the project on its own.

Aside from the efficiencies of cooperative development, Avalanche members can receive other benefits as well. Avalanche's licensing agreement restricts the cooperative's code to members only, eliminating the fear that valuable code will simply be spread far and wide, without competitive benefit to the contributing members. And then there's the question of putting pressure on commercial software vendors.

"One of the original premises was that the balance of power had swayed quite heavily to the vendor side," says Jay Hansen, CEO of the cooperative. "The IT consumer wanted to take back a little bit of the control over their own destiny."

Financial services companies are getting in on the open-source action as well. What began in 1997 as an internal effort to consolidate integration development at international investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) has become Openadaptor, a Java-based open-source integration platform.

"The most common thing you have in a bank is communication between systems," says Steve Howe, DrKW's vice president and head of open-source initiatives. In the late 1990s, the company set out to create a standardized programming interface that would keep internal developers from having to reinvent basic code for every new project. The code behind the interface was shared with all of the company's developers, and each was able to make suggestions for -- and sometimes even changes to -- the source code. The result was a dramatic decrease in development time for connectors.

The system worked so well, in fact, that DrKW hired software development collaboration provider CollabNet Inc., which hosts collaborative development environments for both commercial and open-source projects, to release its connector platform in open-source as the organization Openadaptor. DrKW wagered that if other organizations got involved, it would result in further enhancements to the platform. The idea worked. The core software currently sees more than 8,000 downloads a month of the organization's site. And while no one knows exactly how many corporations are taking part, Howe says that Deutsche Bank AG, Hallifax Bank of Scotland, Hewlett-Packard Co., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and The Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC are all involved.