I can't but help to think there might be some commercial potential here-- it looks incredibly fun to play with. Perhaps a free web-app where you can pay to have animations rendered at high resolution server-side and then placed in a Dropbox folder for download. Or something that makes music videos by using audio information to control some of the fractal parameters during an animation.
You misunderstood me-- I think this is amazingly cool and has a ton of intrinsic value. I was only suggesting that in addition to this, there could be a possibility of making some kind of product that people would like enough to pay for. That would expose more people to creating advanced fractal art beyond a small circle of technologists.
You misunderstood me-- I think this is amazingly cool and has a ton of intrinsic value.
Cool! We're in agreement.
Here's my take: I think there always could be a possibility of making a product that (you could convince) people like enough to pay for. (Here in my country, people literally sell shit for money. Elk shit, to be exact. Apparently, many Germans want to have it in their homes.)
But let's say you come to this wonderful small gelateria in an Italian village. The ice cream is amazing. The setting is amazing. Your experience is breathtaking. Naturally, since we're all entrepreneurs here and all that jazz, you think "I wonder if there's not a commercial value in this". So you start making some kind of ice cream cones or whatever. You make advertising which creates a longing for that experience, that we all kind of know (perhaps even from my few faltering words) of Italian ice cream on a trattoria somewhere in Tuscany. You sell the ice cream to people.
Now, did you expose more people to that original gelateria? No, you didn't! You sold them on the idea, and they got some pretty boring ice cream to eat in their pretty boring home. And you got the money.
That's an approximation of what I'm afraid might happen if you succeeded in convincing the creator to "monetize". But it's ok, you won't do that; first off, he's not here and what's more he's obviously got enough talent to make whatever money he wants to, should he so decide.
Edit: In my original reply, I didn't mean "train". I rather meant "practice". It's a subtle but important difference and I see how it can shift the perception of my message quite a bit. Forgive me, I am not a native speaker.
You make an interesting point about the dangers of blindly "monetizing", but I don't think it's relevant to parent's comment for a few reasons (not the least of which that paying for software doesn't by itself reduce its utility, unlike the ice-cream + scenery example where the implicit scenery value is removed in the commercial "product").
Natural scenery doesn't cost money to make. Making profit off of it isn't intrinsically value-creating.
Software does take effort to make, and being comfortable finding ways to monetize it means more programmers can afford to create things like this. Not everyone has as enough free time to make all the things we want to pro bono. Many people have jobs (often for other people who did figure out how to monetize their own ideas).
So I'm all in favour of developers practicing asking/answering that question, because often finding the answer is what allows them to actually pursue those ideas. It's not wrong for people to sell the fruits of their labour—the world gets fruit that might not have existed otherwise.
Money changing hands doesn't depreciate the value of something.
Your gelateria analogy is flawed, because the gelateria is already a commercial enterprise, making gelato and selling it to customers.
A more apt analogy would be someone who - as a hobby - makes the best damn gelato on the planet...when he has the time.
I think what @eigenvalue was getting at was something like, "hey, I bet people would pay for your gelato, so you could turn this into something more than just a hobby."
What's wrong with looking for commercial value? This community is heavily focused on startups, after all. Is the inherent value of 3D fractal art that it looks cool? I don't think that's lost on anyone here.
It's not that it's wrong, I just felt eigenvalue was so quick to jump to that, you know? And as you say, it's a startup community and so on, and sometimes that seems a little... One-dimensional to me.
Part of it was actually probably my not-quite-conscious perception of eigenvalue's ideas as pretty unimaginative and lacking in potential. What about an immersive world where everything is a fractal and where all players can build new things? Everything is an algorithm with a few parameters and it's made real when you observe it. Now that's a billion dollar idea which might even be an estimation of the workings of the real world. :-)
But, truthfully, it was mostly just a play on words and GPs username.
That a person mentions a single dimension does not mean that they don't appreciate additional dimensions. Perhaps you could seize the opportunity to train yourself not to read too much into a few sentences? :)
This is by-and-large a community of entrepreneurs. We are trained to look for commercial value, and certainly see no benefit of training ourselves to the contrary.
Despite this, we can still appreciate this as art in and of itself. That doesn't mean it cannot be monetized.
I'd be interested to know if you can give a coherent account of what "value in itself" actually means.
Because from at least one interpretation - 'value in itself' means that it is not valued because it has a use in the production of something else which is valuable, but valued for its own sake. And on this definition it doesn't rule out having commercial value at all, since having commercial value simply means that people will pay money for it. It doesn't mean that they have to put it towards some other use.
Personally I find that I have to go to myself in these matters. So, a thing has value in itself if I find it valuable just as it is. Not in the sense "I want to own it", neither the sense of "I want to extract something other out of it", nor what you are alluding to, that it's useful for making something else.
So if I say "this is valuable", then nobody can remove that value by saying "no it's not", that just means, "I don't see value in it".
But none of this has anything to do with what eigenvalue said. With the subjective, immediate way of reasoning I am proposing, the way of spotting commercial value is saying "I want to pay money for this", which I also understand as your standpoint. But that's not what eigenvalue was saying, or rather that's not how I read it. To me it felt more like "I think this could be smartly packaged in a way that would make some other people pay money to somebody else", which I don't particularly like. Hence my reaction.
But again, mostly the wordplay which I found irresistible. :)
Oh okay - so you're talking about product which is intrinsically valuable to its creator, irrespective of it's potential intrinsic value to others. Seems reasonable... don't know if I agree with your larger thesis... but it is an interesting discussion. :)
Ugh, just what we need, another "pro" fractal renderer. Just search around, you can find plenty of non-free 2D ones, and it's not so easy to find a decent free 2D fractal renderer that does anything interesting, at least not last time I looked. I think it's one of those markets where you consistently find a small handful of people that are willing to pay, and the result is a net loss for the world at large, because fractals are cool but largely useless, and it's enough work to build something like this that people are reticent to give it away for free. So no, I don't think there's any real commercial potential there.
