[fsf-members] What would be a decent funding model, anyway?

[Alessandro Vesely]

The following is one of the three points that Paolo addressed in his
"rant from the maintainer":

Paolo Bonzini wrote on 2012-12-22 16:10:19 GMT
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.gnu.general/7873
> 2) GNU is doing too little for the FSF, and the FSF is doing too
> little for GNU.  Due to the huge success that free software had since
> the appearance of the GNU manifesto, distributing free software is
> absolutely not the exclusive of GNU anymore, and that's a good thing.

Large companies, such as Google, Oracle, Mozilla, Apple, seem to provide
a safe harbor to many software projects.  They use their own licensing
rather than GPL.  That may be a good thing... it's certainly better than
proprietary software.  Is licensing part of those companies' marketing
strategies?

> On the other hand, the FSF is not doing anything to value the GNU
> "brand".  Projects such as gnash are bound to have constant funding
> problems despite being (and having been for years) in the FSF's list of
> high priority projects.  Other projects in the list do not exist at all,
> because they would require man-years of development but people who want
> to do the work must, again, do it on their own money.

The question: "Who decide the priority/worthiness of software projects?"
obviously admits "Users" as the canonical answer, for the sake of
democracy.  That may look like a market-driven approach.  Anyway,
relying on spontaneous donations seems to be inadequate, because users
may miss a number of technical points, including dependencies.  Even
market-driving approaches don't seem to care about improving users'
technical skills.  Then, how can donations match some sort of software
"merit" criterion?

Because I'm a programmer, I think I know how important it is for
software to be free.  But I don't think average users get the same
perspective.  So what's the value of FSF in such extended environment?

A fair fiscal policy never came forth, despite theoretical attempts such
as Karl Marx's and Ted Nelson's (the latter about text copyrights only.)
 Will FSF pursue its own say on this core problem?