Blender and the Street Performer Protocol

The Street Performer Protocol, first introduced by Kelsey & Schneier, describes a method for the private funding of public information goods. A campaign by the Blender Foundation, using this method to collect donations for releasing the Blender 3D software as Open Source, has been very successful. This demonstrates that the Street Performer is not just an interesting theoretic construct, but can actually be a viable economic model for funding Open Source works in real life. This paper presents a few thoughts on this test case of the Street Performer Protocol, and reflects some of the related discussion at the Blender Conference 2002 in Amsterdam.