In analogy to the GNU General Public License, we should develop a GNP Physical Sharing License.
GNP would stand for General Non Profit and of course the Physical Sharing part would specify that we are talking about the distributed ownership, without intention of extraction of profit, of physical resources, as opposed to ideas, which are the subject of GNU.
The concept would be that ownership of physical resources can be shared and those resources be made productive and kept available in time, by those interested in using them.
We should avoid calling a price above cost a profit, as a matter of fact, there is no sense to even talk about price above cost. There is no compelling reason to break down the price a user pays into cost and above cost.
In the context of the GNP Physical Sharing License, any payment that must be made for the use of the resource is calculated to pay the cost of maintaining that resource to keep it in good working order and, if needed, of expanding the commonly owned physical resource to meet the demands of all its users.
Once this is institutionalized by providing a framework legal basis for this type of common ownership, I predict we will see many physically productive entities move from the profit-centered type of ownership prevalent today, to the shared ownership as expressed in the GNP Physical Sharing License."
This could be a huge change and I believe we should take it forward in the manner suggested here, perhaps starting with a Wiki as Markus suggests. Your linked page could be the first explanation of what we want, and then we'd need some people who can help draw up the formal framework for this.
