> If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.

The developer co-op projects I've seen have targeted consulting for this reason. The idea is that developers get together and start doing projects that can bill clients immediately, and then they'll pool the money back into developing their own something later.

In practice there's no real difference between a group of people consulting together and a co-op of consultants when everyone is just billing hourly at the start. Nobody really wants to spread their earnings around the co-op because you can see the relationship between hours worked, hours billed, and dollars coming in so clearly.

> and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town.

Most unions derive a lot of their negotiating power from location-based constraints. You can gather enough musicians in one place to form a union because there are a limited number of musicians within driving distance of the location. Musicians can't do their performance over zoom and the job can't be outsourced to another country.

Software jobs have no restrictions like this. Every time there are calls for unionizing software devs, nobody wants to answer the hard questions like what incentives multi-national corporations will have to cater to the unionized employees in a country like the US where we're already paid more than our international counterparts. It's just assumed that the union will form, then companies will have no choice but to accept their demands.