Quote - *I guess it's a good thing that nobody who first started on that project listened to all the folks who said it was impossible or that they'd never get that project off the ground, because it's doing pretty good for an app that is so relatively young. 

*Blender relatively young? I guess you don't know much about the history of blender, it didn't start out as open source at all. Blender has been around since 1999, was a commercial project, company was shutdown and it took some effort and money to get blender open source.

If you look at blender as your inspiration you must realize that the core never developped as open source at all, but by a company that invested a couple of million dollars into it. Without these millions Blender would have never come as far as it has now and even before Blender became open source it already had a user base of 250.000, that's more then DAZ and Poser have combined.

I do hope you realize that......

Nope, truth be told I don't know a great deal about Blender's history, I don't use the program myself and honestly it's not one I'm likely to use anytime soon.  But there are plenty of other projects on sourceforge that serve as good examples of how a properly managed open source project can produce great results in a relatively short period of time, including more than a few in the 3d realm.

More than one 3d rendering software package available from sourceforge, and most of them already have more features, better rendering capabilities, and better speed than firefly.  But hey, believe whatever you want to believe.

I'm just some dumb schmuck with over 20 years experience in software development.  I couldn't possibly be trusted to put together a team of open source programmers to work on a project that has pretty much been 3/4 written by other people all ready, that would be way too complicated for me - lol

Oh, and no need really to respond with more flak, you won't dissuade me.  Tell you what, if you truly dissaprove of the project that much, feel free not to use it when it's ready for release.  Just for the record though, the earth isn't flat, man really did walk on the moon, and yes, open source projects really can produce good code.  If you don't believe me you might want to google something called "Linux".  I'm sure somebody told it's original developer that it was a really stupid idea too.  Thank goodness he's as hard headed as I am when it comes to such things.

Again I have no idea what motivates you or anyone else to be so damn negative about an idea like this, its not like I'm in here schilling for investors, I'm doing this in my own free time as a way of giving back to the 3d community.  Can't imagine why that inspires such vitrol, it's not hurting you or anybody else, but apparently for some reason just the notion that somebody out there might even try to code something to replace Poser or Daz Studio seems to send you and your ilk into a tizzy.  I have to admit folks like you baffle me. 

No matter, your opinion has been duly noted and logged.  I filed it right next to the core from the apple I just finished, in the round bin next to my desk.  Anything else you'd care to add that doesn't include helpful suggestions will likewise be duly filed in the same place.  Fair enough?

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...