A corporation is nothing but a community. I expect what you mean is that when one community operates a service and a different community uses the service, there will be competing interests? That is certainly to be expected. Although, there is a clear solution: The community who uses the service can also run it.
I disagree. A corporation is a machine for economic production. It is not a community, it is a mechanism. Communities can exist within corporations, of course, but the community aspect is secondary at best.
A corporation is merely a legal recognition of a group of people who have decided to work together towards a common goal. That's a community, plain and simple.
There is nothing about a corporation that implies economic production. In fact, many (most?) corporations are negatively productive until the community decides to disband, and some corporations are established with explicit intent to not be economically productive (e.g. non-profits).
> A corporation is merely a legal recognition of a group of people who have decided to work together towards a common goal.
I don't think so. There are tons of corporations that consist of one person, after all.
Corporations are legal entities that are distinct from the people that are involved with them. That's the whole point.
But a lot of this depends, I suppose, on what you mean by "community". People who are part of a corporation are a community by the strict dictionary definition of the term, but they aren't necessarily a community in any meaningful sense. A community works together, collaboratively, to support each other. Typically in a corporation, the people are working to support the corporation rather than each other.
> There are tons of corporations that consist of one person, after all.
That can be true. Certainly communities have to start somewhere and not all efforts by one person will see a community form. While this is a fun point for the sake of pedantry, it doesn't change much. One person running the service and a different person using the service results in the very same competition of interests. It's all just people at the end of the day. Even the legal system itself is just people.
> Typically in a corporation, the people are working to support the corporation rather than each other.
Typically people work to support their own interests. This is true in communities of all shapes and sizes, including communities which have been legally formalized as a corporation. In all cases one's own interests may help another's, but that's ultimately incidental.
No different in this community. When we write comments we are doing it because we derive some kind of individual benefit from it. Most likely the entertainment value in thinking about something and putting it words. If someone else takes something from a comment, that's merely a bonus. It was never really for them.
