> Which makes me wonder...could something like FOSS happen in any other
> economic sector? How many things are like this?
There are some discussions on implementing a development model for pharmaceutical industry.
http://www.druid.dk/uploads/tx_picturedb/ds2004-1408.pdf "The open source movement in the software industry suggests an alternate avenue for promoting the development of new drugs and managing intellectual property rights. Rather than focusing on the assignment of rights after something new has been developed, the essence of open source is to radically change the development process before there exists something worthy of being assigned a set of rights. By altering the development process, open source offers the potential of not only maximizing the probability of a breakthrough, it also has the potential to reduce the time it takes to develop breakthroughs, test their viability and safety, and bring them to market."