It would take a Herculean effort to start such a project, and it would be virtually guaranteed that 1) few people would trust it since it's not a name-brand and 2) it would be several years before it had feature parity. The social and technical inertia combined make it not a good use of time.

Big open-source projects always face both the obstacles you mention. What overcomes the barriers is someone who, regardless, wants to "scratch their own itch." Someone will do it but on their own timetable and terms.

I wish there were a centralized way to crowdsource-fund open source projects...

As long as Apple keeps selling old FCP to those who need it before getting the new Final Cut up to speed feature-wise, I don't see the problem. If you stick with the same old, ugly codebase forever you end up with kludgeware like Photoshop... or Windows. The mistake here was ever taking old FCP off the market in the first place until they got the new one fixed. I mean they are selling it for $300, so that's almost an admittance on Apple's part that the feature set sucks.

I think the free software video editors have been too fragmented to produce one.

http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2011/07/15/the-glorious-history-of...

>If there are, then where's the GPL video editor that competes?

Not working on it, doesn't mean they don't exist.

It is the same place the os that Competes, and office suite that Competes and whatever else that Competes are. Nonexistant.

How does a tool like Cinelerra compete with FCP's feature set?