Stallman originally suggested a tax on computers that would be distributed equally among free software developers, which I think genuinely would be socialist (I don't think the FSF has ever actually campaigned for such a tax, though). I think most free software is funded the same way proprietary software is funded: by being written by an employee of a company to supply some specific functionality required by that company (IBM and Google would be examples here), or by being sold (as with the SuSE and RedHat versions of Linux).
> My computer is full of little shareware programs that I've paid
> anywhere from $5 to $50 for. That's a nice model - artisinal
> programming with no middleman. While we work on the socialist
> revolution, of course.
The payment on the honor system that drives shareware is just as good a model for small-scale free software as it is for small-scale proprietary software. And, as I'm sure you'ld say in other contexts, there's a definite limit to how much small-scale artisanal production can accomplish.
--
"The slightly richer ... eat in semi-darkness, preferring
candles to electricity. These candles make me laugh. All the
electricity belongs to the bourgeoisie, yet they eat by
candle-end. They have an unconscious fear of their own
electricity. They are embarrassed, like the sorcerer who has
called up spirits he is unable to control."
-- Vladimir Mayakovsky http://blog.voyou.org/ voyou at voyou.org