chaecuna posted at 12:52PM Sat, 31 October 2015 - #4236079

LPR001 posted at 2:12AM Sat, 31 October 2015 - #4236072

and I fully expect that content to remain in my possession long after this all dies down

Until the deal is further altered.

If DAZ manages to impose this step, they can (and will) go further down the software-as-service road. The "logical" next step is everything-is-"free" but then you have to pay a small amount whenever you try to render or export a scene. It is not far fetched, it is like what happens in pay-per-view video services where you have to pay whenever you watch a movie, regardless of whether you have already watched in the past (contrast with buying a DVD and then being able to watch the movie without further costs, as many times as you like).

Wow, this would be a nightmare to work out payments for the PA's that create the majority of products at DAZ3D, nightmarish to the point of making it actually completely unworkable or even impossible. A full analysis of every scene rendered by every user, then a breakdown of which items were more important in the scene (Psychical Artistic analysis of each complete render), a breakdown would then need to be generated across up to a potential of 100's of different PA's work in every scene rendered by every user 100,000's of time a day. Sounds like it would need a computer bigger than the NSA... All with the potential of making less money for each PA and DAZ3D as a whole with massive implementation costs.
Any proof for this or just more sky is falling talk?.. See above reference...

Perversely, there is a positive side in this story. Up to a couple of days ago, I considered Richard Stallman insistence on free-as-speech (w.r.t. to just free-as-beer) extremist, almost taliban-like. I have now realized that this stance is instead fundamental, because it means that, as long as you deal with free-as-speech tools and content, you are never at risk of waking up in the morning at the sound of a big, black-clad brute, wheezing that the "deal has been altered". The time and money I invest in e.g. Blender or GIMP won't go down the drain tomorrow at the wim of some PHB/marketdroid/bean counter and therefore... back to my project of a library of Cycles shaders for rendering Poser/Studio characters into Blender, the first step to kiss everybody (SM and DAZ) bye bye.

Nothing is %100 guaranteed in life. Even life itself.

SO the first step to kissing SM and DAZ goodbye is working out how to implement SM and DAZ3D figures into Blender. I see. Seems that using Blender without SM or DAZ3D figures or making your own would be the first step? Or am I oversimplifying...