Re: Practicality of GNU project and libre movement

[Stephen Paul Weber]

> Where could free software be if authors were paid equally with their
> nonlibre-authoring peers?
> [...]
> Even $50M could completely fund a coherent free operating system on-par with
> proprietary counterparts.

I find that while having/getting money is a bit of an issue, an equally
(actually, I expect *much bigger*) issue is how to spend it.

If you (where you is anyone reading this email!) had $2M to spend on software
freedom: what would you do?

Could just give it to the FSF, but approximately $0 of FSF donations goes to any
developer (or UX person or other contributor to any software) so while the FSF
does good work that cannot be what we are talking about in this discussion.

Debian famously has too much money already and no idea what to spend it on.

Could do a *lot* of Outreachy interships for that, and that would be very good
for the community and the world, but would it move the needle on any strategic
software improvements people in this thread have in mind?

I'm not saying there's nothing we could do with money, but what *should* we do
with money?  Buy ad campaigns?  Hire designers and product managers to help
create forks of popular projects that need polish?  Fund existing full-timers
who create things we already use and need but who just scrape by (if that)?
Find people who wish to go full time and pay them to do that on their existing
project?  Which projects?

I mean with *infinite* money we could maybe just fund everything in this list,
but even the Biggest Of Tech do not have infinite money.  They have a lot, but
more than than what they have is leadership.  Good, bad, right, wrong, they have
a system in place to allocate the money they have to further their goals.

Ok, I'm rambling too much, let's focus on the question at hand: if you had $2M
*right now* to use on furthering the cause of free software, what should be done
with it?

I'm very interested in your answers.

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