Is there a precedent for making something that exists to become open source using KickStarter money? I proposed this very thing to KS once and they rejected me. But I don't know if they make these judgments by their perception of the product rather than the nature of the transaction.
In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR, as a one-time fee so that the NaN investors would agree on open sourcing Blender. To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday Oct 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
