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Here's what I'd love someone to organize:

A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay Microsoft to make Windows open-source.

If Windows becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with Windows, especially those coming from a Linux background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.



Here's what I'd love someone to organize:

A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay The Government to make Everything Free.

If Everything becomes free, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with The Government, especially those coming from a Poor background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.

Anything sounds ridiculous at scale


I think paying to open source SublimeText is a bit more ridiculous than paying the government. SublimeText is a license to print money at this point. It's the _default_ editor for just about every (non-bearded) engineer and costs $60 (soon, $70). The government, after all, is just a representation of its people. If the people want communism, then that's what happens.


"It's the _default_ editor for just about every (non-bearded) engineer and costs $60 (soon, $70)."

Without going into whether the open-sourcing is good or not, I'd just like to point out that you're wrong about this. I sincerely doubt that Sublime Text has more than, say, 5% marketshare in terms of what people are using. It gets a lot of talk on HN because we tend to a) know about new things and b) overly use Text Editors in favor of IDEs, but this is not reflective of the world at all.


I'm not trying to validate the Kickstarter idea, but thought I'd add that making it open source doesn't mean they would have to stop selling it.

WooThemes is an obvious example of a company that makes a heap of money selling open source software.


It's called true socialism. It's a perfectly viable political system, provided it's correctly setup.


Unfortunately, it's for the most part flawed as the correct setup you mention requires the human element to behave itself to maintain balance.


I know. Hence the lack of true, pure socialist countries in the world today.

It also requires a post-scarcity economy. Which, supposedly we could achieve if we worked towards it, but again, that human thing keeps us from doing that.


If you're suggesting that this won't work because the numbers don't make sense, then I think a better way to go about it is to do exactly what forrestthewoods did in another comment - talk about actual numbers.

Much more convincing than making analogies which most people can dismiss pretty easily.


Is that a reasonable comparison? No.


Why not? Its the same principle just a question of scale.


That's a straw man argument. "Same, except for scale" alone does not make it a reasonable comparison.


I tried that one on a gun nut with no luck. "If you think it's your right to own and carry a gun, then why don't you think North Korea should be allowed to have its own nukes?"




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