Free software is supposed to be about scratching your own itch. In that tradition, Tom Lechner has spent more than nine years working, mostly alone, on Laidout [1], a graphic application designed primarily to lay out and bind booklets that is full of tools found nowhere else.

Lechner is a cartoonist and artist living in Portland, Oregon, who often publishes booklets [2]. "I went to school for physics and math at Caltech," he remembers, "but spent a lot of time making artwork instead of finishing my homework. When I finally realized that, I went off to be an artist instead." The problem was, "as a starving art student, then a starving artist, there was no way I could buy software or hardware sufficient for anything I wanted to do."

Hearing rumors about Linux, Lechner investigated and soon found that its lack of cost was only one of its advantages. "Since the entire tool chain is open source," he said, "if something doesn't quite do what you want, there is the option to dive in and improve it oneself. Artists' needs tend to be very unpredictable, and often tools have to be used in ways the tool designer never intended. Having complete access to all levels of the tools at hand is a tremendous asset. Open source also generally has a great community behind it. If you get stuck somewhere, there's usually a forum or mailing list somewhere that has a solution. I definitely gravitate to more obscure and experimental approaches to things, and open source generally is very open to that sort of thing."

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