I think paying to open source SublimeText is a bit more ridiculous than paying the government. SublimeText is a license to print money at this point. It's the _default_ editor for just about every (non-bearded) engineer and costs $60 (soon, $70). The government, after all, is just a representation of its people. If the people want communism, then that's what happens.

"It's the _default_ editor for just about every (non-bearded) engineer and costs $60 (soon, $70)."

Without going into whether the open-sourcing is good or not, I'd just like to point out that you're wrong about this. I sincerely doubt that Sublime Text has more than, say, 5% marketshare in terms of what people are using. It gets a lot of talk on HN because we tend to a) know about new things and b) overly use Text Editors in favor of IDEs, but this is not reflective of the world at all.

I'm not trying to validate the Kickstarter idea, but thought I'd add that making it open source doesn't mean they would have to stop selling it.

WooThemes is an obvious example of a company that makes a heap of money selling open source software.

It's called true socialism. It's a perfectly viable political system, provided it's correctly setup.

Unfortunately, it's for the most part flawed as the correct setup you mention requires the human element to behave itself to maintain balance.

I know. Hence the lack of true, pure socialist countries in the world today.

It also requires a post-scarcity economy. Which, supposedly we could achieve if we worked towards it, but again, that human thing keeps us from doing that.