> Kickstarter is one of those SaaSS systems that RMS was arguing against. I upvoted your post, but this statement misses the point. How does it matter if Kicks

> Kickstarter is one of those SaaSS systems that RMS was arguing against. 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.