Wikipedia happens to be supported by a huge quantity of individual supporters around the world, both in writing and in funding the servers and development. They

Wikipedia happens to be supported by a huge quantity of individual supporters around the world, both in writing and in funding the servers and development. They actively avoid reaching out to wealthy philanthropists and governments and get all their support from the general global community. Wikipedia indeed requires a smaller dedicated team to keep the system running. But they are not subsidized in any pathological way. They are funded by large quantity of small donations. There's nothing wrong with that. We don't need to reach a true post-scarcity world in order to better allocate the scarce resources we have. It's completely feasible to provide a basic income or other basic resources just like we do with clean water. We can have mechanisms to charge for use beyond the basic level. And we can have the community fund people to make the resources we want. The "pirate economy" you talk about is the "freerider economy" (pirate is a stupid term here). Freeriding is a REAL problem. We can't live on a freeriding economy. But we can still have Free/Libre/Open resources if we can get people to fund them without compelling them through artificial restrictions. Wikipedia works because the scale is SO large that they get adequate support despite freeriding. There's also lots of ways to discourage freeriding / encourage donation better than we do now. The first step is to get everyone to STOP wasting their limited funds on proprietary products so that they actually can afford to better support Free/Libre/Open ones.