Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Buying the rights to proprietary programs to free them

[Fabian Rodriguez]

Le 2016-02-05 05:25, Fabio Pesari a écrit :
> Can this be done?

I know of at least one succesful big project that went that way. We may 
learn a lot from this:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1755283828/open-source-edition-of-livecode

At the time I was providing commercial support for this and couldn't 
believe it would make it (and it did!). I haven't followed the project 
very closely since then but I remember this funding ( £493,795 or 845K 
USD at the time!) was managed by the original company. We'd to ask them 
why they did it in the first place and look closely how their current 
financing/business model works.

Keep in mind LiveCode is software used by thousands of people, there is 
big annual conference, books, etc. - something I had no clue about until 
I got that contract.

In a previous thread about priority projects I mentioned health-related 
software and hardware, it never hirts to directly ask the company if 
they would considering opening up their source code and publishing it 
under a Free license, but I bet it would go way further iw we could say 
"XYZ already has governance / financial / legal structure to help you 
achieve this", although most companies wouldn't agree to letting their 
product go. I lack the time to elaborate at the moment but this is 
certainly something we already have all the pieces around for, just not 
clearly or actively proposed to proprietary software companies that I 
know of.

- Fabian



--
Fabián Rodríguez
http://fsf.magicfab.ca