Startups Cooperative: Workable or Pie in the Sky Fantasy?

As you know, the idea behind the corporation is the pooling of assets by many individuals to provide greater operating money and to spread out the risk of failure among the group. Could such a collective approach work for startups?

The idea here is less like a corporation and more of a cooperative bent. Each individual startup is still independently run and operated. However, because infrastructure can be troublesome and expensive, some sort of sharing agreement is in play. Instead of everyone writing all the components necessary to make their own startup function, such an arrangement opens up the possibility for code reuse. Granted if the component is a vital part of what makes your startup valuable or unique, it would not be reasonable to share it. Authentication code, web GUI frameworks, database(s) and the like seem like reasonable candidates for this sort of arrangement. Labor pooling and/or sub-contracting possibilities may also be viable as well.

Obviously, two startups in competition would not be ideal candidates for such a strategic partnership. However, companies using similar platforms and languages could benefit tremendously from such an approach.

One last thing of note, cooperation may also be useful in matters of platform creation. Consider the possibilities for say a purveyor of blogging systems, a photo hosting service, and a collaborative news service to join forces and build a common social graph to compete against Facebook, Google and Myspace.

I realize people don't usually get along very well together. However, some frameworks (like constitutional government) have succeeded in the past. So what do you think, is this idea totally ridiculous?