-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:25:37 +0100 Fabio Pesari <[email protected]> wrote:
> We hear about companies like Facebook and Google buying out startups > all the time and I thought, why don't we use crowdfunding to buy the > rights to proprietary programs ourselves and release their code under > the GPL? (Of course, we have to be sure all their dependencies are > also free). > > New programs might be too expensive but we might be able to buy the > rights to some older programs, as well as some indie games (of course, > we'd release the assets under the CC BY-SA in that case). > > Can this be done? I know it would require huge sums of money but I > think plenty of people would donate to free a program like Renoise or > a game like Mount & Blade: Warband or Dwarf Fortress. > > I believe that *theoretically* this is possible - assuming whoever it is is willing to sell under those conditions. It'd certainly be something I'd support - financially if needs be - especially if we're also releasing the assets behind the software in question. There are quite a few older games that I wish were free, and it's possible that this approach could actually get us a free equivalent much more efficiently than a reimplementation. - -- Koz Ross <[email protected]> www.retro-freedom.nz If you aren't using GPG, you should be! https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en. *** Please don't send me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html for why. *** Proud member of the Open Wireless Movement. Find out more at https://openwireless.org/ *** Proud member of Peers, at http://peers.community/ . We grow freedom. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJWtHqxAAoJEJARVr/lAw1AvwoH/jhNJhPVZ9s3HRDNe+MiaDMP tzxR+1xnFPkfscoQAVt0//sOV4uIuZwv1lYvkKCkg2Z6VSLmom4izy/8FSQGkSla 37hHP31gClsd3chSXFq+3vqzYQGQ+zIO011hiQV3XYatPp4kC/91ak3GktzA53Wz 8kD/XHg5xup+KyQUsSzqp5e8weGwH4hwUDlh2lxLgT7Bch/aGUivCeLcC16WrcHs +GNsyEw/Tu1UzhvOFhHC7jJSNxJrSg9wew8G/jTld19fCwhXYeaEPP4rJdOKuLwb jJJWjVDP9sKp4nDjtVlhL+oyGJiQIsqVeTkuymNffbbk5fhao2xJpIoTPEuWivE= =Akpn -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
