The problem is that many people fail to see software as an actual product that needs to be produced. Hopefully Ducati can lead the way with a donation-sponsored business model. Maybe that could illustrate the free-rider principle more clearly.

True, but many is not all, by far. Star Citizen (a software product) raised over 19 million dollars [1] in crowdfunding! Way more than .99$ per app and yes, it does make enough money to compensate for a company.

And FOSS is already developed today and will be in the future, based on donations in terms of money and time as well as other income sources like support and merchandise. Just like I stated in my post.

The difference between the traditional donation model and the newer crowd funding model, ala Kickstarter, is that there is a clear feedback to the supporter. To me this is a game changer. When I spend money on, say, git-annex (which raised over 25,000 USD!) I know that the project won't get build in the proposed form if the goal is not reached and there are clearly defined stretch goals as well. Depending on the amount I also get a corresponding rewards, e.g. my name in the credits or special merchandise articles. Its also great feedback for the developer. If they can't raise the money they know that there time might be better spend on something else.

I'm really surprised that seemingly every commercial business is getting crazy about Kickstarter now, but so few FOSS proponents see the appeal.

PS: What is Ducati? Google only shows the motorcycle brand.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_citizen

Idealism gives you a target but not a roadmap. As others here have said without Propietary software much of what we have in software just wouldn't exist. Kickstarter wouldn't exist. If the whole world were full of enough people who shared RMS's Ideals then his Ideals would be workable. It's a bootstrapping problem. And RMS spends so much time complaining about the bootstrapping that it sounds like he'd rather not get there all if that's what it takes.

Maybe that's not what he actually thinks but that's how he comes across.

Me? I do want to get there and I'm willing to bootstrap to do so.

I upvoted your post, but this statement misses the point. How does it matter if Kickstarter is SaaS? The hardware that RMS software runs on isn't free either, neither are his tea bags. Maybe, it would be good if these things were free as well, but I think thats not what we are discussing here.

> idealism gives you a target but not a roadmap

I thought I had spelled out quite a detailed and realistic road map in my last post, no?

> As others here have said without Propietary software much of what we have in software just wouldn't exist

True. Maybe it will always stay this way, maybe it would change if more FOSS was funded by 'crowds'. Git-annex for example is quite innovative I would say. But again, that misses the point a bit. We would like to have the software we rely on to be free. Where the original innovation came from is less important in my opinion - as long as it sustainable. Let me know, if one day innovation dies out because FOSS is eating the launch of commercial software. I can't imagine this ever happening.

I am not advocating that we should not pay for commercial software any more. Just saying we should do our best to fund more FOSS, especially for core technologies like kernels, developer tools, file sharing, communication etc. So for instance, you could pay Dropbox for their service but also donate to something like git-annex. In the long term git-annex might be cheaper and better so it would pay off.

In my opinion, crowdfunding with a pay-upfront mechanism (ala Kickstarter) is THE answer to one of THE major problems of the 21st century: How can we compensate creators for information that is no more under their control once released?^

This applies to software, hardware designs, movies, music records and books.

^ Note that an alternative solution that has been proposed is DRM and even police state like laws. That alone makes it a very important problem for everyone.