sorry for the length-- the original "i have a dream" speech was also long.
by the way, mlk jr was killed before i was born, but ive shaken hands with someone who shook hands more than once with mlk jr. ive met one of his close allies in person.
im sure the answer is in crowdfunding and also organisations. i am sceptical of the efficacy of organisations, including the fsf (but im on the "free software" side of the debate nonetheless-- its not just about words, but deeds) but a mix of the two will probably get us farther than just crowdfunding (like kickstarter and things like that.) in some ways crowdfunding isnt really new-- and musks loop is just a subway.
but i think crowdfunding could be a very big part of it.
i like to make this forum neutral territory so i hate to name names, but watching debian and devuan operate as organisations (formal or otherwise) has led to great scepticism from me about how much we can rely on such things. so far: "a bit," we can sometimes.
i spend several hours every day on this-- before i even used gnu/linux i wanted to package up a windows alternative and give it to everyone. but that was impossible, and i wasnt ready for most free software until a few years later. i spent many years migrating, ive tried between 40-80 distros. i had my reasons.
i started by saying that organisations can help, and im also saying that i think how much we can rely on them is limited. the fsf is not speaking out against the cold war. systemd is more than a camels nose in the tent, and the fsf is idle about it. they fight both for and against other causes i care about, when all they would need to do is have a similar stance for software and culture-- or at least a neutral stance on free culture. instead they make it worse.
i talk about the problems of free culture here:
the free culture movement
i talk about free softwares self-censorship here:
censorship, exclusion of free software by the free software movement itself
i still think the fsf is the best free software organisation, though im less impressed with fsfe. fsfla gives us linux-libre, ive talked to its author on several occasions. for a guy that works at red hat he is the best (i consider red hat the enemy, alex is ok. he should probably quit working there.) i wont use linux-libre, but i used to.
people have spent decades getting conditioned by marketing to think of software as being packaged like a product. the metaphor is no coincidence-- its conditioning.
a better metaphor for software (per rms himself) is the recipe-- recipes can be used and alterered freely, and while copyright is a prohibitive issue sometimes (i cant just take the better homes and gardens cookbook and scan it and sell copies) the truth is that we are far more free with recipes than with software, or most of it.
but i like a bottled water metaphor. imagine a world where everyone grew up without plumbing-- some places are still like that. and the first time they ever found water that wasnt drawn near their house, it was in stores in plastic bottles.
so in this crazy bottled water world, the water falls from the sky but everyone is conditioned to think of it as a thing you get in a bottle. a few people put buckets out, but theyre crazy and-- you can do that? i mean "thats not practical" and "its easier to just buy the bottles."
no one wants to go to the trouble of rainwater collection.
so years later, people build water treatment facilities and run plumbing all over the towns, but everyone still thinks this is really weird, its so much easier to just get bottles. water is important so ive already got it in my budget, you can choose lots of different brands and so on, it even comes with flavours.
more and more people get running water and use the sink, but most of the world thinks of water in terms of bottles from the store. and they just dont like the pipes.
i dont like the pipes either-- the water that comes out of mine is dubious (as is the water in bottles.) but the best thing to do about this is get a filter to put right on your sink.
its more cost-efficient than bottled water, it keeps infrastructure relatively local, the bottled water industry is too much about profit and it gives nestle way too much control.
i happen to think even distros (the whole distro concept) gives developers too much control, and i think what has happened to debian and devuan (and arch) proves that. though arch isnt the best example as its still really about customising. in debian land there is more lip service about this, im sure there is some in arch.
so distros (and water bottles) are better than nothing, and a distro (or distro-like thing) is a very convenient way to distribute software. when i talk about "the end of the distro" i dont mean the end of the thing you download and write to cd/dvd/usb. i mean that organisations like debian are increasingly unable to provide the kind of service that so many different users really require from free software.
when enough people need freedom, the distro concept may not scale as well as we need it to. the distro concept is limiting and rather than abandon it i think just looking for alternatives (or inventing alternatives) that dont rely so much on it will help.
i think distro-alternatives and interesting ways to recreate distros are going to help. i collect automated remasters: ive got one, obarun may count, olpc has got one, a guy named wiki made one out of the very thing that inspired mine, and a guy named nic (probably not you though, but his name is nic) made one.
so priorities of mine include, in no particular order:
* talking a lot about software and freedom
* talking about the cold war between monoplies and free software (systemd definitely is a trojan horse, though perhaps not in the usual computer terminology of software trojan. the "payload" is not software, it is the concentration of control)
* working on software designed around a large number of ideas about eduction that wont fit in this already extremely long reply
* fixing messes created by the software cold war
* advocating for free software, mostly around fsf-type lines (open source? well, i used to be on that side but that was many years ago, i dont care for open source at all)
* freely talking about what i dont like about the fsf (because even if theyre they best, theyre not without fault and the world doesnt need more popes)
* freely talking about what i dont like about osi, microsoft, red hat, systemd, google, fb
* advocating relatively new (but not entirely self-invented) solutions to modern free software setbacks, including organisations ones (via restructuring: putting filters on running water and moving away from a completely bottle-centric ecosystem.)
tl:dr; the details may differ a bit, but i feel i share your dream.
i also think that everyones details really differ a bit, which is why collaboration should be based on shared goals / common ground, not consensus. collaboration based on consensus means that one person doesnt like you and they can stop you and everyone else. thats ridiculous.
but perhaps you shouldnt have to assist me in a single thing that we dont have in common. its good to know what we share, because in those things, we may be able to help each other. hard to say-- but thats the idea.
as for camps, open source has spent a decade or two saying that open source is "just like free software, only better." and then saying free software should "get with the program."
the "program" (as it stands) is cozying up to monopolies. money doesnt bother me-- monopoly does. free software will never deliberately cozy up to monopolies-- free software was designed to take power away from them, and open source was designed to share power with them.
monopolies (per their definition) do not share power. you can take it away, or you can give it back-- there is no sharing power with them.
ben mako hill said at libreplanet that its time for free software to distance itself further from open source. yeah-- better late than never. if debian had done that, it wouldnt have fallen to systemd.
we need more freedom. and youre right about hardware-- hardware is getting so cheap and custom (in manufacturing terms) that a lot of the software threats we stand against can simply be moved from disks to chips: backdoors, non-free blobs, vendor lock-in and other problems. we are already suffering from this, but its not going to get better without bringing software freedom to the hardware.
even the rhetoric people use is so wishy-washy, theres a lot of doublespeak. its ok to be polite about it, but compromising principles too much just means that even the best successes will be akin to failure. we dont need extremes (theyre not extreme) just solid principles. and they wont be much that is new, except for more people taking them seriously and applying them more consistently.
otherwise its just "freedom, but--" and that isnt practical or realistic except in the most cynical of terms.
i dont use linux-libre because of a design flaw that makes you less free. i think the standard debian and void kernels are more free. alex oliva is always welcome to argue with me about this. the problem is, he sort of understands it just fine.
freedom 0 is the freedom to use software for any purpose.
linux-libre is prohibited by the fsf from advertising non-free software.
the fsf has proscribed some things that effectively limit freedom 0 in the linux-libre kernel. this is a major, major, major flaw imo. the 4 freedoms should come first, and the prohibition on advertising non-free software should come after the 4 freedoms in importance, not before.
only the fsf can fix that, but the rest of us are free to ignore the problem and just go blob-free instead.
linux-libre is a valuable project, but it has this major flaw-- so i avoid using it.