No Renapd, I understood that. I started using microcomputers before Apple or IBM got into the business. Back then, the only software you had was either free from other hobbyists or you wrote it yourself. Nobody was selling built computers so you did it yourself. And I don't mean you plugged a pile of boards together into a cabinet. You soldered every resistor, every chip, every capacitor onto the pc boards. If you didn't understand something you figured it out yourself because there were no books, no web, no computer courses and end-user support had not even been concieved yet. In a city of over a million people there were maybe 50 like minded hobbysists. It was a superb graphic achievment if you managed to get something to bounce across the screen. My first computer had a horrible ascii only monitor, cassette tape storage because floppy drives were stratospheric in cost and a whopping 16k (yes, k) of ram. In Canadian dollars (and allowing for inflation) this thing cost me about $16,000-$20,000 and was considerably larger than a very big microwave oven. Then commercialism entered the picture. Today I use a 5 lb notebook with a large truecolour active matrix screen. It has a 20 gig hard disk, 56k modem (as opposed to 300 baud), dvd, 192 megs ram, cd burner, graphic tablet, photo quality printer, scanner and an accompanying digital camera that's pretty damned good. I can sit in the cockpit of my sailboat and communicate with other digital artists in Singapore, Turkey, Russia, England and more. Gallery displays across the world are only a mouse click away. All this for less than $6,000 Cdn. Comparing the software I now use to what I started with is like comparing a caveman's world to your wildest high tech science fiction fantasy. So when somebody asks me if I miss "the good old days" what can I possibly answer but "No"? My experience in most things is that the good old days never were. It remains true that as I stroll through the on-line Poser world I still find far more information and models that are free than those that cost. As I said, I sympathize with Tribe's sentiment. But increased commerce leads to increased choices. I like choices. jschoen offered a pretty good hat for free and is thinking of offering a somewhat better alternative as well for apparently very few dollars. Why would this be a bad thing? I was also here and elsewhere a year and a half ago and more. Yes, there are more items for sale. But there are a lot more free items than there used to be too, and frequently of better quality than previously. I am content to share my world with both sides. - Jack Valero