Hi Laurie.

I just want to clarify my view on OSS since you brought up the subject.

I have been an advocate of OSS since the early 90's. I used Linux since version 0.9 and I was the main OSS advocate in Borland for the 8 years I worked there. JBuilder for Linux and Kylix happened not with small effort from myself. In fact I provided the Linux training for the Delphi team early on, before Kylix was started.

With Blender I wrote the code to support polygroups in the OBJ iporter/exporter of Blender 2.49. That was explicitly to support the create of Full Body Morphs for Poser. That is, of course, Open Source code. Just before starting the Reality project I wrote an Open Source exporter for Blender that generates After Effects scene to use with the 3D camera animation in Blender.

With Lux I contributed a few small things:

• the support for transparency maps in SLG, which was prompted to render Poser hair

• the support for index-based bump maps for SLG

• the support for command-line loading of scenes in the Lux Render Queue

• the support for addition and subtraction textures to emulate the add/sub functions of Color Math node of Poser

• several updates to the documentation

Lastly, you can check my Blender Survival Guide, a series of 13 videos geared toward the Blender beginner and aimed at teaching how to use the program for Motion Graphics work. It's available at Creative COW for free and it took months to be made.

I'm mentioning these just to make clear that I support the philosophy and I've been doing this for decades now, donating substantial portions of my time to the cause. I believe that OSS and commercial software can coexist and that there is a very healthy interaction between the two. With so many OSS packages out there it's clear that commercial software needs to offer something more in order to justify its price. For example, while I am a stern supporter of Blender, I don't use it for sculpting because its feature set for that operation is not even comparable with the one offered by Zbrush. This is an example where commercial software is able to justify its price tag. Features, usability and support are the main areas where I see commercial software can compete. 

With Reality I try to do the same: provide a program that is innovative, that provides a user interface that makes the job much easier than any ither exporter for Lux/SLG, and that I support constantly.

I'll leave it to the customers to decide if these are values worth paying for. In the past two years the reaction of the market has been very positive and now I'm thrilled to be able to do the same Poser. 

I hope that we can all have an open and cordial dialog about this. I am open to all questions about Reality and how it works. I might not be able to answer them in detail until the official  announcement is made and that is why I can't address some of your questions right now. I kindly ask you to be patient for a couple of days.

All the best. 

Paolo

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