From some of the discussions in earlier posts I gather that DAZ made the decision to implement their own application at the start of the year or possibly earlier, based on a perception (probably well informed) that the future of Poser in CL's hands was not guaranteed. If CL were to collapse, Poser (already orphaned twice in its development history) may never re-emerge. DAZ's entire business is currently based on the well being of Poser, so 'hedging their bets' in the face of this possibility was a sound, and probably necessary, business decision. As it emerged, the release of Poser 5 probably re-invigorated rather than dampened DAZ's commitment to developing its own solution. They, like myself and others, see the financial future for CL in probably a worst state than it has ever been. On the initial P5 announcement, CL made it clear that they were intending to aim at mid-range of the market. While the initial pricing issue caused a lot of concern for hobbiests (myself included), the speed and scale of the reversal was in business terms, even more of a disaster. Effectively, in a stroke, they had dumped their long standing business plan, as had been apparent for some time in the P4/ProPack/P5(RRP) pricing tiers. What effect this had on their relationship with their investors and to what degree this lead to their subsequent pre-release financial problems can only be guessed. In order to keep investor confidence (hence money) they have to be able to create and stick to a workable business plan. While it may seem admirable that CL responded so quickly in the face of the community's initial reaction to the (RRP) pricing, this also indicates that they may have badly misjudged the market in the first instance. If DAZ understood this weakness in CL's business strategy it would also help to explain why they felt it would be worth developing their own solution. Shortly after the release of P5, and before I became aware of the development of the DAZ program, I began to examine the feasibility of open source application, specifically with the features and functionality that I would have liked to have seen in Poser 5, rather than what we got. My motivation for this project ('FreePose' for want of a better name - and I am open to suggestions) are (like DAZ) to ensure that even if CL and Poser go down the tubes the market will survive. From what I have read, DAZ may be intending a pre-Christmas release of their application, wheras FreePose beta code probably won't be available until early 2003, and even then only core source code that will give developers and contributors something to work with. However a project manifesto and a design and feasibility specification should be available imminently. The key features of the core code are strong and efficient resource management, a well defined plugin interface architecture, the ability to 'host' a wide variety of object types (eg. geometric objects and figures, procedurals etc. in fact just about everything I can think of including 'generic' data defined by third party plugins) and, of course, portability. Everything else (including renderers, file importers and exporters and user interface) will be supported through the plugin interface. The ability for external plugins and applications to access the entire data and functionality of the program will ensure almost limitless extendibility. As a baseline test for this functionality, the program will be required to host 10000 seperately posed 'millenium'-type figures in a scene with numerous, but as yet unspecified, basic model types and texture variations with a minimal memory footprint (100 MB or less seems feasible). There are no actual performance requirements associated with this baseline test, just that the data structures can handle populations of this scale and that the code can access any parameter without falling over. The program will probably be developed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) or the MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license as this seems to offer the maximum level of unrestricted use of code for both proprietry and open source development. Under this license it should (and this is my intention) be possible for anyone (including CL and DAZ themselves) to incorporate the FreePose code into their own applications. I'm not intending this in anyway to directly threaten the future of Poser or CL. For myself, and probably DAZ too, the cheapest and least risk free option will still remain with the continued financial health and development of Poser itself by CL. It's just that it seems unwise at the moment to put all my eggs in the Poser basket. I have become aware that this is not the only Open Source project to be looking at this area. Somebody, in an earlier, pre-P5, post in this forum pointed out that Poser had no effective competition in the market. Within a month or so of this observation, the market began to look very crowded indeed. Sadly I feel that 'Poser' has outgrown its original creators. Bill