We hear about companies like Facebook and Google buying out startups all the time and I thought, why don't we use crowdfunding to buy the rights to proprietary programs ourselves and release their code under the GPL? (Of course, we have to be sure all their dependencies are also free).
New programs might be too expensive but we might be able to buy the rights to some older programs, as well as some indie games (of course, we'd release the assets under the CC BY-SA in that case). Can this be done? I know it would require huge sums of money but I think plenty of people would donate to free a program like Renoise or a game like Mount & Blade: Warband or Dwarf Fortress.
