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How To Make Money With Free Software
fons writes "Dutch Python hacker/artist Stani took part in a contest organised by the Dutch Ministry Of Finance to design a 5 euro commemorative coin. And he won, using only free software: 'The whole design was done for 100% with free software. The biggest part consists of custom software in Python, of course within the SPE editor. For the visual power I used PIL and pyCairo. From time to time also Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch helped quite a bit. All the developing and processing was done on GNU/Linux machines which were running Ubuntu/Debian. I would have loved to release the coin under the GPL, which could maybe solve the financial crisis. However for obvious reasons I was not allowed to do that.'"
Did you RTFA (or more specifically LATFC)? This coin has algorithmic outputs both on the front (the Queen made out of architect names) and on the back (an outline of Holland made out of books). I can't see how anybody could create it using Photoshop or Illustrator. The coin designer probably spent more time coding than sketching (like the book Snow Crash).
Also, it's beautiful. I want one, no, a few million of them.
The more talent you have, the less important the tools are.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"You seem to be setting up a straw man. Can I help you with that?" -Clippy (because no, I never said what you suggest I did)
Most of my students have no context in which to understand the difference between the two. But since you asked, I will be teaching GIMP soon, as the art faculty in my college have demonstrated an interest in helping students grasp the Open Source aesthetic. Also, you may have noticed that I *do* teach GIMP currently, as an optional item.
I'm not sure where you heard that. The school has already shown interest in paying me more to develop a curriculum for more advanced students which would heavily involve Open Source software. We also like the idea of establishing a one-of-a-kind creative lab by spending more money on capable hardware installations than on software. You may have seen this happen at schools like MIT. But still, I come to /. to hear the old arguments against Open Source stuff, so...well played, my literal-nicked friend.
Not sure how serious you were, but I think I can counter.
First, you say that C# is a closed and proprietary language. You also say there is no spec for the C# language. While Microsoft's C# compiler itself may be closed source and proprietary software, it is an open standard per ECMA. You also state that developers won't be porting the language to new systems, yet I can count at least two compilers (both open source) available for non Microsoft systems.
You then ask if it can be used to create an operating system, if it can program set top boxes, or be used in embedded systems. Well, yes (Singularity), eventually (it has been noted that one use of Singularity would be set top boxes) and yes (.NET Compact Framework or Embedded Linux with Mono).
You may state these solutions are inefficient or inadequate, and I won't argue against that. However, to say they don't exist at all is not true.
His editor is really good, but some performance issue on my 64bit. I prefer it over Erik4 otherwise.
I think you can savely assume that if he is not happy with something, he just changes the source code and recompiles.