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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.'"
This guy is a master of symbolic design. He's the modern heir of the artistic geniuses who did all the dense symbolic religious iconography in early christian churches and for secret societies. It's perfectly fitting, since architecture, particularly classical architecture, is loaded with design secrets and hidden meanings, and the coin is about architecture. This coin being loaded with dense symbolism and being about architecture, I hope there's something masonic hidden on it somewhere. I assume the masons were active in The Netherlands?
My question is - did he just use open-source on principle, or did it confer an advantage on doing this project over the commercial alternatives? Or was it harder to do it with the open source software? Clearly it involved a lot of custom scripting. Did he go as far as to look at the source code to accomplish this, or dig into the software in other ways that couldn't be done with closed source? Anybody know?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Not really, but your comment may indicate that you're a bad reader. I was referring to my "new" students, the ones that come in on the first day with lots of presuppositions.
I don't see where I argue against that in my post. Also, "pales" is one of those words that doesn't exactly help anyone understand your point. More than needing to hear specific reasons, I'd want to know why you would feel the need to list them, considering the fact that you own both.
Are you saying that you can do that? Because for many who can't, this is actually a powerful lesson to learn. Many aspiring designers learn this lesson too late; I know a few who use adobe software not because "it works and I can express myself with it" but because "it makes me look professional in conversation." In fact, I am considering dropping a subcontractor for this reason. He can use the software, but he makes excuses for his lack of design training.