[temp10298385]

Good question. I think I can best answer this by example:

People get paid to develop Blender. Blender even has an in house film studio, with paid artists. The software and artwork is made available for free. No artificial scarcity is imposed. And no one is starving.

Trying to emulate the restrictions of the material realm is the wrong direction.

[tonyedgecombe]

It's a good example but I can't help feeling that we would end up with a much smaller ecosystem if that was how all software was funded.

I work in a very narrow niche selling B2B and my experience tells me it just wouldn't be viable if it was open source. I'd end up selling support which is not how I want to work.

[mushysteven]

I don't think comparing the Blender Foundation to an artist is fair. And Blender is a software widely used in the industry.

[temp10298385]

It is an example of how to think outside the constraints of scarcity when dealing with immaterial ”property”.

But if you are looking for individual artists there’s Patreon.

I’m sure people can think of reasons why Patreon does not fulfill some criteria which to them is important for a healthy artistic community. After all, people are imaginative. What I’m encouraging you to do is to use that imagination to think of ways to embrace digital abundance, instead of trying to shoehorn the property rights that humans constructed to distribute physical goods onto something inherently non-physical.

If humanity can not handle the virtually infinite supply of digital goods without artificially enforcing scarcity, what does that say about us?