Cool ideas

Street Performers and Net Artists

In the recent weeks it has occured to me that there is a parallel between street performers and netizen artists who make their work available on the net.

For instance, an open source hacker (a netizen) who makes a program available to the public (the net community) is similar to a street performer who shares her music freely with the people walking past. The musician cannot charge the people a fee, but instead she hopes for donations from the passing crowd.

Open source hackers are not much different, except that most hackers do not even hope for donations from the net community. To that effect, I would encourage net artists (musicians, authors, hackers, etc.) to create a page where the net community can drop some bucks into the artists contribution box.

I've done that, in hopes of raising money to buy some Apple hardware to teach myself OSX programming. Who knows if it takes off, but if you feel that my work/thoughts deserve a few bucks, please visit my contribution box!

Update: The contribution box has been renamed to the tipjar!

Posted by Mayhem at September 8, 2002 01:16 PM