http://www.mambogani.com/news/technology_news2.php#slash

How To Make Money With Free Software
timothy
Posted 10/30/2008

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.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/30/2138259&from=rss

– – – – – – – – – – –

Allow me to second the idea noted above.  Especially when capitol may be in short supply, the cleaver usage of that which is also called “open source software”, can enable businesses and individuals to complete their chosen projects.  Note too, that many, though not all, of such soft ware tools are associated with the Linux operating system  That O/S is itself open source software, with development and tech support coming from The Community of its users. 

– – awm – –