" - What happened to "content wants to free"?" -Content providers want to eat! " -- from interview w/ Jakob Nielsen about the commercialization of the www. Rudi, it's an extremely interesting discussion you've started - or re-started, 'cause we've seen it quite a few times already. I won't reiterate the pros and cons, it's been done eloquently enough above. But I will offer a double-sided practical suggestion that might bring more freestuff items and creators on stage. Personally, I have had the good fortune to have my humble freestuff items hosted by Shadowcat, who's been extremely generous with her bandwidth and time. At my end of things, I have done all I can to keep the d/l size of my items as small as possible (less than 500K zip for a clothing figure including doc and poses). This is both to ease my troubled conscience at dumping the hosting work (and expense) on Cat, but also because I know how I feel when browsing freestuff on a 56K modem, and being turned off by those multi-megabyte d/l's. My own models may err on the low-rez side, but some freestuff models have tons of vertices that make no discernible difference in the surface appearance (or increase the morphing opportunities) - going just a bit easier on the subdiv'ing and smoothing will go a long way towards more bandwidth-friendly models. Compressing you OBJs can cut'em to almost half the size WITHOUT losing anything. Ditto for 2D stuff - I know that good tex's, need a lotta pixels, and that JPG loses information in compression, but JPG WAS invented for a purpose ;o) My suggestion : well, if you have space and bandwidth to spare - share ;o) If you're doing freestuff that other people host - keep those file sizes small. And if you've got money to spare - buy ;o) Keeps the pro contributors out there in business.