So I’m trawling the news sites this morning in lieu of my morning paper (so last millennium) and I see this:

StarWreck – A Finnish spoof of StarTrek created by 300 or so people working on personal computers working collaboratively over the course of SEVEN years. They’re doing something very interesting with their masterpiece, distributing it only over the internet (straight downloads, BitTorrent, etc.)

Image captured from the movie rendered digitally

How do they make money? Well, they don’t really. They’re selling t-shirts and charging for physical media (DVDs.) My guess, they’ll pull in more Euros than they think…they’ve got an estimated 700,000 downloads since September 30.

There’s a recent example that is even closer to home, the

Sun/Google deal announced yesterday. We’ll bundle the Google desktop with each Java and Office download to start – and Sun gets cold hard cash with each instance. This is a great example of monetizing a community by adding value to the community with frictionless distribution. This is just a start, stay tuned….