A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay Microsoft to make Windows open-source.
If Windows becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with Windows, especially those coming from a Linux background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.
A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay The Government to make Everything Free.
If Everything becomes free, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with The Government, especially those coming from a Poor background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.
Anything sounds ridiculous at scale
Without going into whether the open-sourcing is good or not, I'd just like to point out that you're wrong about this. I sincerely doubt that Sublime Text has more than, say, 5% marketshare in terms of what people are using. It gets a lot of talk on HN because we tend to a) know about new things and b) overly use Text Editors in favor of IDEs, but this is not reflective of the world at all.
WooThemes is an obvious example of a company that makes a heap of money selling open source software.
It also requires a post-scarcity economy. Which, supposedly we could achieve if we worked towards it, but again, that human thing keeps us from doing that.
Much more convincing than making analogies which most people can dismiss pretty easily.