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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.'"

31 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Making money by homer_s · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I would have loved to release the coin under the GPL, which could maybe solve the financial crisis.

    Actually, people printing too much money was how this crisis started in the first place.
    (and they are going to solve it by ... issuing more credit).

    1. Re:Making money by Tawnos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wasn't really caused by printing too much money (especially since a lot of the money was never printed, but just given out on paper). The issue is more that the money loaned out was secured in a way that didn't correctly model the risk of giving out that money. When it was found that the assumptions made were faulty and began to unwind, a whole ton of shit hit the fan. I'm not going to suggest (in this post) who caused the problem, loaners or takers, and if the problem is being best resolved, but the problem wasn't caused by loaning out too much.

    2. Re:Making money by hey! · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Printing too much money is a metaphor for creating too much one through one means or another.

      Well, one should be careful of believing metaphors too much. It is possible to make your metaphor work, but only through considerable twists of logic. The question you have to ask whenever you do that: is it worth the effort? Does the metaphor tell you anything worth knowing? The GP is precisely right: people don't know how much risk they've undertaken, so they don't know how many of their assets are, in accounting terms, "cash equivalents". So what has happened is that the flow of money through the economy has been gummed up. This is exactly the opposite immediate effect from what you'd get "printing more money" (actually extending more credit). People would not be able to get rid of their dollars fast enough, lest they be inflated away.

      Here's a metaphor that is much better than the printing one, a metaphor that derives from accounting but draws upon physics: anti-money. The way you get a certain number of dollars into circulation is to create an equal number of anti-dollars. Eventually, the dollars return to annihilate and be annihilated by anti-dollars.

      The process of creating money and anti-money is called "credit".

      Every dollar borrowed by a big bank from the Fed is balanced by an anti-dollar on the Fed's books. When the Fed reduces interest rates, then banks borrow more cheap dollars from it, putting more dollars into circulation, balanced by anti-dollars on the Fed's ledgers. However: while the Fed influences the money supply, it's not the only or main creator of money. Anybody can create money, perfectly legally by extending credit. A dollar exists if an only if everyone believes it is there..

      If I were Warren Buffet, I could write on a piece of paper, "Pay to the bearer one million dollars. Signed, Warren Buffet" then hand you that piece of paper, writing "one million anti-dollars" on my ledgers. You could go out and spend that "million dollars" as if it were a bundle of 50,000 $20 bills. As long as that paper was absolutely convincing, as long as everybody agreed that note was worth a million dollars, it would be a million dollars.

      You could deposit it in a bank, which put it in its vault. Since the note can't be conveniently divvied up, what they do in effect is create a million dollars of money and a million dollars of anti-money, securing the promise represented by that creation to their ability to demand a million dollars from me. That's very important. The promises represented by money form a kind of chain of obligations, ultimately anchored to the Treasury's endless ability to create dollars. When financial transactions occur, the chain is reconfigured. When I issue the note I forge a ring in the chain and link that to my upstream debtors. When your bank redeems the note, I take my ring out of the chain and splice them directly to my upstream debtors.

      That's where printing comes in. Nobody wants a lot of physical dollars; they don't want tens of thousands of dollars in their wallets, or billions of dollars in bills in their vaults. But they want to know that if they yank on their end of the chain, the Treasury will respond by printing a dollar. That's what the full faith and credit of the United States amounts to: a promise to print as many dollars as the Fed says exists. In practice the amount of physical dollars is an infinitesimal fraction of the total dollars in circulation; the capacity to supply virtual demand is transmutes credit into money. If any upstream link in the chain is questionable, all the downstream credit ceases to be money and becomes investment.

      The source of the current problem is that the financial system has attempted the equivalent of pulling itself up by the bootstraps. Individual institutions discovered that they could insure securities with things like credit default swaps. That means instead of carefully

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  2. Re:More like... by woot+account · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or the purpose of the article is to bring light to the fact that he won the contest using only FOSS software, and they chose the title of "How to Make Money" as a pun, where you would assume they meant "how to profit", but they literally meant "how to design money".

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  3. Re:More like... by moderatorrater · · Score: 4, Funny

    You could have the same title for an article about an author that wrote a book using OpenOffice.

    Slashdot actually rejected my submission when I did just that. It's a pity, too; Return of Macbeth is an instant classic.

  4. This is an excellent example by femto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This guy won due to superior design, not due to the fact that he used free software. The free software is in the background, contributing but almost incidental to the final product. That's how is should be though. Free software released the artist from the constraints of having to fit in with someone else's idea of what software or technology he should be allowed to use, leaving him free to be creative and follow his own unique path.

    1. Re:This is an excellent example by elashish14 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nevertheless, it's good publicity for FOSS. If you show that you can be productive with it, more adoption.

      In fact, if more people that use FOSS say it, it will remove the stigma that such software is substandard to the business alternatives.

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    2. Re:This is an excellent example by Bryansix · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Uhm, there is an excellent chance that he would NEVER be able to afford all that software if he actually had to buy it at commercial going rates. So the free software was a great tool which was also an enabler in this situation.

    3. Re:This is an excellent example by femto · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I agree with you but for different reasons. The judges would have been oblivious to the fact the free software was used to design the coin. They gave the award based in the design in front of them, uninfluenced by its means of production. The artist won 100% based on his design. Hence the first part of my comment.

      Tool selection is part of the behind the scenes design process. The free software tools contributed to the artist's ability to realise his design. He might have been able to do it without free software, but would have had to divert effort from being creative into forcing the tools to do his will. Being able to afford the tools for the job is part of it, but I think a larger issue is that free software provided the customisability to get the job done.

      This is why I think it's an excellent example: he won the prize entirely though his own resourcefulness, but free software allowed his resourcefulness to go places it otherwise could not have.

      Observation: Funny that I just came out with words to the effect of "where do you want to go today?", the old MS slogan. The important thing is not the question, but the answer. Some software will let you go lots of places. The excellent case in point, the example of the coin, has demonstrated that free software's answer is "wherever you want to go".

  5. Re:How to Make Money with Free Software by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    00101111 00101110

  6. That's Impressive by Phat_Tony · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

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    1. 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.

  7. As a Computer Graphics Instructor... by TheModelEskimo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...it made me giggle with joy to see the guy mention he won against people using Adobe products. I teach Adobe products to impressionable college students, and when they sign up to take my class and purchase their own copy of Photoshop or Illustrator, boy do they think they have ARRIVED in cool-town. Many of my new students think that once they *understand* how to use Photoshop better than most, they are now a graphic designer, creative person, illustrator, web designer, etc.

    So I started doing an extra credit assignment where I tell them they are not allowed to use Adobe products, and they have to design a postcard. They use any package they want; most use GIMP or Inkscape because they're free. Without fail, they come back and say, "hey, I can't do anything with this. It's not Adobe. It sucks." So I point out to them that their Adobe software skills make them think they're pretty good at design. But what happened to their awesome design skills when they started using another software package? Does the software really suck, or do they just hate it because of its non-Adobeness? I show them nicely-done work by other GIMP or Inkscape users. Blank looks. Lesson ensues.

    Relying on a specific software package is fine. *Depending* on it is risky. And *not being able* to design using anything else because of some marketing-infused mental block just means you're spoiled and/or ignorant. Bravo for the true creativity displayed in the article.

    1. Re:As a Computer Graphics Instructor... by LandDolphin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Adobe is a tool. Much like your key board is a tool.

      That test as akin to asking someone to type with a non-QWERTY style keyboard.

      Your test did not challenge their design and creative abilities, it tested their ability to use different tools.

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    2. Re:As a Computer Graphics Instructor... by TheModelEskimo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not a test, it's an extra-credit assignment that is optional. The assignment exposes their response when given a new tool to use. This is valuable because it answers this question: Do they discard the new tool because they've only learned craftmanship with one tool, or do they attempt to use it and seek help where required?

      If a student views himself as a craftsman who uses one tool, he needs to know that he is selling himself short, that is all. Half of the student's grade in these classes is based in the application of design principles independent of any specific specific software package. So for an extra credit assignment, that's more than appropriate.

      Also, If I were teaching a keyboarding class, I'd have no problem exposing my students to Dvorak or Das Keyboard in similar optional, extra credit assignments.

    3. Re:As a Computer Graphics Instructor... by LandDolphin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I only meant "test", as in testing their skill. I did not mean to infer that it was an in class test. Sorry for any confusion there.

      I believe there is value in learning to use multiple different tools, no matter what your trade.

      The reason I said something was because you were talking about their design skills. But the extra credit assignment did not tackle the issue of design skills as much as it addressed their ability to use a different tool.

      At the end of the day, I think it was a wonderful extra credit assignment to give them. Something to challenge how they see the tools they use and possibly expand their horizons.

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    4. Re:As a Computer Graphics Instructor... by TheModelEskimo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If they think knowing Photoshop makes them good designers, then it means you're a bad teacher

      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.

      GIMP does pale as a Photoshop replacement for professionals

      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.

      You can draw Mona Lisa in MS Paint [youtube.com].

      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.

    5. Re:As a Computer Graphics Instructor... by TheModelEskimo · · Score: 3, Informative

      only when you use GIMP will you become a "graphic designer, creative person, illustrator, web designer, etc".

      "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)

      Why don't you teach GIMP instead of Photoshop?

      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.

      Oh, that's right - nobody will pay you to teach it.

      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.

  8. humor alert: It's a joke, and it's funny! by marhar · · Score: 5, Funny

    For the humor-impaired, it's a pun:

    make (earn) money vs. make (design) money

    referring to the often asked question, how do you make money with free software.

    get it?

  9. Re:More like... by lahvak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But he was *making money*, get it? Coin - money...

    Anyway, the interesting thing here is not that he designed something with free software, people do that all the time, but that his design won. Of course I didn't read the article, but A assume his was not the only entry, and that at least some other entries were prepared with proprietary software.

    So it wouldn't be "an author wrote a book using OpenOffice" but rather "a book written using OpenOffice won some prize". Of course books created by free software regularly win top places at typography contests, so it would still not be that unusual.

    There is, however, certain feeling among both professionals and public that in the area of graphics design, proprietary software rules, and using free software gives you a serious handicap. That is what makes this interesting.

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  10. Re:Fuck Python by sexconker · · Score: 4, Funny

    The GP makes a post, saying "Fuck Python C# for life!", and you make a post essentially saying "Fuck C#, real languages for life!".

    It's a real battle of wits, isn't it?

    How dare someone prefer one programming language to another!

  11. 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.

  12. Re:Fuck Python by Sloppy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, it's just the kind of petty small-mindedness that I would expect from an emacs user.

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

    The more talent you have, the less important the tools are.

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  14. Re:Fuck Python by sexconker · · Score: 4, Funny

    I hear you.
    Fuck emacs, vi for life!

  15. And with the award money... by Edward+Kmett · · Score: 4, Funny

    Asked what he was going to do with the award money, the artist said "I'll finally be able to afford Photoshop!" ;)

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  16. Re:Fuck Python, no, Fuck C# by John+Sokol · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I am a VI user not an Emacs user.
    Why? Because emacs often requires installation, where VI is by default on almost every Linux and Unix system, it's also an extended version of "ed" that is a very useful tool.

    Anyhow it's not small mindedness, because C# is closed and proprietary it very limited in it use.

    For example you will not see developers porting the language to new systems. Only Microsoft can do that!
    Hence it's not a real language in that respect.

    How about project usage? Can you write an OS with it. Or program set top boxes or other embedded applications?

    real languages can go anywhere. it's not some petty personal bias. It's a real fact, C, C++, Forth, Java can be counted on as running on almost even known CPU and hardware device ever developed.

    C and Forth are almost university the first languages to run on any CPU!!!

    Where C and Forth goes, Python, perl, php, java, pascal and many other languages are easy to port over on top of the C compiler. Except C#, J++ and other proprietary solutions.

    Try that with C#. Oh you don't have the language source code... Oooh too bad. You don't have source for all of your libraries or even a clean spec on how things are supposed to work. Oh well call m$ and see if they can help.

    vi for life!
    see my site http://www.churchofbsd.org/

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  17. Re:Fuck Python, no, Fuck C# by martinw89 · · Score: 3, Funny

    You just got whoooosh'd.

  18. Re:Fuck Python, no, Fuck C# by hclewk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, basically, shovels are better than back hoes because with a shovel you can make both small and big holes, but with back-hoes, you can only make big holes. However, what you aren't taking into account is that while backhoes can't make small holes, they are way more efficient at making big ones.

    And just for the record, a "small hole" is a low-level project, such as an operating system, and a "big hole" is a higher-level system, like a software program.

    I'm not saying that C# is better than C, just that they have different purposes and are therefore better at different things.

  19. Re:Fuck Python, no, Fuck C# by Zhila+the+Great+Z · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  20. Re:Fuck Python, no, Fuck C# by amorsen · · Score: 4, Funny

    it's also an extended version of "ed" that is a very useful tool.

    Yesterday my Fedora 9 updater told me that I had a security update.

    For ed.

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