If we could focus: what news or information is present currently on the state of bidding, the process, etc? I read earlier int his thread it is being offered as a full bundle and not individually? Is this true? Is there a place where such information can be found?
This is the PDF currently being sent out to people showing interest in the sale. You will note that there is no pricing information in there, it's just a general sort of overview over which licenses Interplay thinks can be converted into something usable in the mobile game space. There is, to my knowledge, no public information about the bidding process as a whole, but they have said that licenses will not be sold separately.
You will also note that they consider FS to be in the same tier of licenses as Descent, Earthworm Jim and MDK (I think those are probably the highest value ones in there for future development, but who even knows, maybe we'll all be playing Battle Chess next year).
This is of the utmost importance, as the current situation dictates consideration, facts and investigation of the bidding and sale process itself instead of conjecture on what happens after.
To start with, any bid entered by us would not be for the FS license, but for the whole package of licenses that they will bundle it with. Secondly, there is no public information about the valuation of any of these licenses; Presumably this includes ongoing revenue through GOG and Steam. To obtain more information, you will have to contact the agency organizing this whole thing (you can find this info on the internet).
That being said, I do not rate our chances of entering this very high. Even if we assume a low-ball estimate of 100k USD for the whole pack that would interest us, this would require us to raise somewhere in the region of 150k USD through kickstarter and the like (Including overhead costs incurred through kickstarter fees and the costs associated with hiring someone to act as our representative in these matters). I think that, as passionate as this community is, that's not really feasible.
(That being said, if we could create this campaign with the explicit goal of setting those licenses free, we could probably get support from others in this).
So, TL;DR: We don't have enough information to know whether or not a crowdfunding campaign could work, because Interplay and the people representing them haven't released them yet.