Idea: A reputable organization like Crow Hill could organize a crowd-funding campaign to open source one or more NI apps. The organizer wouldn’t have to commit to maintaining the code, just making a minimum one time upload to e.g., gitlab.com with a permissive license. From there, others could fight over the right of succession to be the maintainer of the most trusted fork. But the first step would be to secure access to the source code–and if the crowd is to donate, they need someone they can trust to not just run off with the money.
Idea for structuring the crowd funding campaign: One dollar (equivalent) donated equals one vote for prioritizing which assets to try and buy. Or maybe also let people earmark their donations. E.g., Deadmau5 could pledge $10,000; but only if we get Traktor.
Obviously, buying individual apps would require a bit of insight into how Native Instruments’ code is organized but I think Native Instruments’ investors would provide that overview if there were a serious offer on the table. Donators would need to understand that probably a good chunk of money would go towards Native Instruments’ ~Core Libraries~ which don’t do anything on their own but provide shared functionality between multiple apps and would make it easier for anyone to build an app that’s like an NI app.