[ColinEberhardt]

Very cool. I actually created a shareware application that rendered Photomosaics 25 years ago! Here is a link to "Mosaic Magic" from the Wayback Engine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175706/http://fishsoft.c...

I managed to make a decent amount of spending money from that application during my University years.

One interesting lesson I learnt was about enterprise pricing. I think I charged ~$20 for Mosaic Magic, however, I started to get emails from organisations asking about pricing for commercial use. Nothing on my pricing page suggested that commercial use was prohibited, I guess they just thought $20 was rather cheap. From there-on, I charged $150 for "commercial use". Basically, anyone who thought they should be paying more, did!

Finally, Robert Silvers filed a patent and trademark for Photomosaics in ~2000, and was, for a while aggressively pursuing organisations that he felt was infringing. I assume this has all died down now.

[jakemanger]

Thanks for sharing! Both the link and the story. As a University student and someone that has here also made a photomosaic app, that is super relatable.

That's good to know about the pricing. It's free for now. Honestly didn't expect this level of interest (there's 307 people on the site right now according to analytics).

With that interest, I may add some plans - potentially for the commercial use in particular

[bryanthompson]

I used Mosaic Magic back in my high school journalism class to design a yearbook cover 20+ years ago! Turned out great - it won some kind of award iirc.

[jakemanger]

That is so funny - after all these years you were sitting at your computer at the same time and clicked on the same post as the creator

[ColinEberhardt]

Oh wow, so cool to meet someone who used an app I wrote 25 years ago. Great to hear from you and congrats on the prize!

[teiferer]

Kudos to OP for not immediately thinking about how he best could monetize this.

I'm glad FOSS made Shareware die out, but now web apps requiring me to create an account first have taken its place. Kudos to OP for resisting that too.

[verelo]

I just read up on Robert Silvers based on this. He had an interesting career. Really unfortunate he was a patent troll...