Re: Kickstarter for Emacs

[Richard Stallman]

    > Is it likely that Emacs development would excite people who happen
    > upon it in such a site?  Or would most of the funds come from people
    > told about the project by the FSF?  I expect the latter.

    Neither. Most successful crowdfunding projects get most of their
    publicity in a viral manner. Most of the funds would come from Emacs
    users who have no contact with FSF, but read about it on some blog
    they follow, on Twitter, Facebook, on a mailing lists, etc -- by their
    someone who has donated and is excited about it.

You may be right, but it does not affect this question.
It is a multiplier on both sides.

If X people find out through our announcements and Y people through
the crowdfunding site, and if each of them directly or indirectly
leads to a total donation of M from themselves and various people they
inform, the total will be M (X + Y).  A large value of M is good, but
the question here is about how X and Y compare.

    I would also /strongly/ suspect that while FSF itself could probably
    run a successful crowdfunding campaign to fund it's activities in
    general, that for a specific software project the more it is about the
    individual developer(s) wanting to implement Their Thing and the less
    it is about FSF, the more chance of success it has.

    Not because some people don't like FSF, but because they want to give
    money to the people who write the code.

Maybe we are miscommunicating.  I am comparing two different ways to
inform people they can give money to developers to write a particular
change.

--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call