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How To Make Money With Free Software

Posted by timothy on from the actual-money dept.

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.'"

3 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I don't get it.... by HonestButCurious · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Whatever. by sootman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:That's Impressive by bmcage · · Score: 4, Informative
    Dude, the guy wrote an entire python editor, SPE (Stani's Python Editor)! The special forte of it is that it integrates with Blender.

    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.