The FSMC will not direct what developers need to work on what. The developers work like they do now like a free market, developing what they want, organizing themselves like they want. But say there are customers that want voice recognition applications, the FSMC will transmit that market information to the developers in FreeDevelopers. Then whoever wants to work on it and build cooperating/competing teams to work on it, can do so. Then what gets used and paid for, is distributed to the developers in an equitable way.
It will not do it for many, boring, business-specific developments. A lot of money is generated by the development of specific software for specific businesses and in this case, only the customer knows (ahem, should know :-) ) what its needs really are.
ironically for these customers, free as in beer is not a plus. It is a reason for not using the software. These customers especially will be the ones who will go to the FSMC and generally they will be enough to fund most of the development. We will make it the statement that, no one got fired for buying FSMC software.
It might take more, such as giving some guarantees over developed software. In my company, for instance, we always provide a one year guarantee on our softwares. And we have to produce something that works, we can not put a disclaimer and tell use it at your own risk. I know a lot of people will oppose proprietary softwre companies like microsoft to gnu/linux to get a point, but there are also serious software companies, like Sun, who provides software they guarantee and that (usually) really works.
Now, I have a challenge. I have spent a lot of time working on the CommCo and explaining it. Now, instead of putting me on the defensive and having to defend my system. Why don't you construct a better one? I find most people in the community attack any idea as bad, which is the easy thing to do, but then do nothing more. While an idea may be bad, the current situation can still be worse. It is silly to attack any new idea and remain with a bad status quo.
Isn't it, at least in part, the "flaming" that did the quality of free software? Hopefully, it will do the quality of free developers. :-) The points I doubt the most in your project are: - just one company producing free software. having just one company can not be good. - developpers freely developing and the clients paying what they like. It can be true for mainstream software but I do not think it might for everything - the guarantee problem. Software provided "as is" is not acceptable for many businesses. Even it they take greater risks by using windows. :-)
Best regards,
Ludovic