"Open source the basic Poser engine so that the above improvements can be made in a reasonable amount of time without Curious Labs or Poser users needing Hollywood blockbuster budgets. Curious Labs could make money selling additional content, behavior scripts, maps for bounciness and fleshiness for existing figures, training videos, and other products."

Some of the other suggestions are interesting... but I don't see this one as practical or useful for CL.

Despite the protestations of much of the OpenSource community, the final result of something like this would be the complete and utter destruction of most of the value and competitive advantage that Curious Labs possesses.

The disadvantage (the complete loss of control over their intellectual property and the sum total of all the effort and investment it represents) will never be offset by any profit in selling maps and so on - Daz barely makes a living doing this kind of thing already, and the Poser market isn't nearly large enough for two such companies at the moment.

Curious Labs is in a good position at the moment to hang on to their intellectual property - they have the resources of e-frontier on board and their would be competitor is finding out that building a tool like this is much harder than they thought it would be. In other words, there isn't one good reason to give away the source code.

The theoretical idea that they would gain a large development base, let alone one that could make significant and useful contributions to the code base is not born out by most of the OpenSource projects in the world - the vast majority of them fail to garner any useful level of developer interaction and event he few that do usually get most of their core features from a development group no larger than the one they would have had commercially.

The case of Curious Labs is, to me, a great example of when NOT to OpenSource. They intellectual property has great value as it is mostly unique, the customer base is fairly large and retail distribution is in hand. They have recently acquired access to dramatically larger resources of both money and technical support (e-frontier) and the chance to mingle technology with a product that has significant features to add (Shade). Why would they give all that away now to become a company selling weight maps.

"Add compatibility with POV Ray, or better yet allow its use as some kind of a plug-in renderer. It is much better and more versatile than Poser's."

Before Firefly this might have been important, but Firefly is an extremely competent renderer - there isn't anything to gain by using POV.