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Re:The most advanced MySQL raytracer on the market by aasasd on Thursday October 10, 2019 @06:01PM (#21219627)
For better or worse, there's no scarcity in software. And thus, “we hackers do for love what others wouldn't do for money.”
Re:The most advanced MySQL raytracer on the market by tpmx on Thursday October 10, 2019 @06:07PM (#21219668)
I'm thinking the democoders could create scarcity. I'm imagining e.g. Future Crew making a Third reality. Or Triton making Crystal Dream III. Release at like a 300p video for the world and like AM audio mono sound quality and sell the binary to the highest bidder. Or perhaps smarter, release it at 1:1 quality for the first minute, but only for the first minute.

;)

Edit: of course this would be a horrible future. Also, there's no way these now old guys could recreate the magic they experienced together in the early 90s.

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU

(make sure to enable the thirdparty english subtitles)

Re:The most advanced MySQL raytracer on the market by vidarh on Friday October 11, 2019 @04:55AM (#21222627)
You can create scarcity by marrying the software with a physical object.

William Gibsons poem Agrippa [1] is easily accessible, though it was distributed as part of a program that'd overwrite the floppy it was distributed on.

But it was sold in various ridiculously expensive collectors editions.

While the point of Agrippa is ostensibly the poem, the mechanism of delivery was very important to the appeal of it as well as the media attention (of course the fact that Gibson was well known by then was important), and you could imagine something similar for a demo. Add a hardware element, and packaging that forms part of the whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)