....
Kickstarer to me should be for people that have actual innovative projects and ideas of their own and need funding to get started, not for existing companies to raise money to buy the means of mass producing the fruits of someone else's efforts with an (at best) quasi-legal sales pitch. Kinda douchey.
Kickstarter is there to be a venture fund for small sized ventures ("small" relative to what folks up on Sand Hill Road do in Silicon Valley). You'd think a business could get a loan from a bank but banks are typically to busy creating voodoo derivatives to shoot themselves in the foot with to actually be a "bank". (there is nothing wrong with derivatives in general , but a lots of snake oil folks that are into the space now. )
There are lots of folks who have taken relatively open solution , added money to commercialize them , and then contributed back into the space. To some extent webkit.
Cynically I think they more likely want to jump start this so they can sell into countries outside the law in large quantities. Cash in as some reputable ( in a perverted way) clone company in China or similar country. But yeah that is only likely to blowback more so on Mac users and the tinker crowd when Apple cracks down when that goes viral.
Technically this might not actually fit kickstarters guidelines for technical projects.
" ... D.I.Y. We love projects from the hacker and maker communities (weekend experiments, 3D printers, CNC machines) and projects that are open source. Software projects should be run by the developers themselves. ... "
But again QUO is tiptoeing around the facts as with the IP. It is couched as a hardware project but it is really firmware (software) that is making a difference. Open source is also a slippery slope if there are many developers do really need to include them all. There are likely polishing tweaks that they are doing; is that a "large enough" differentiators.
That kind of debate I think Kickstarter stays out of. Judgement by the jury of the investors is how they, kickstarter, tap dance out of it getting entangled.
