Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=483699

Larry,

I dont know if it was my earlier post or those of others that made you feel so compelled to speak into this thread against your better judgement. If it was mine, I apologize as that I did not intend anything that would be viewed as inflammatory or derogatory towards CL. It is a very tricky position for both of our companies in dealing with public issues. Sometimes it is best to remain silent and let speculations run amok and other times it is best to jump in at the right time to handle damage control. It is nearly impossible to always know what is best. We have sure made our fair share of mistakes.

I have always enjoyed working with you personally and feel that you try to deal with people on a fair and honest basis. The problem I have is that you may not know all the details of the dealings that DAZ has had with other individuals at your company. I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt that your statements in your post are based on misinformation rather than a desire to be dishonest or misleading. I do feel that your statements paint one side of the fence but leave the other untouched. I will discuss some of those statements directly.

First of all, the characterization that DAZ decided not to support development for Poser 5 in January is wrong. DAZ has decided, since January, not to support Poser 5 for legal reasons of their own invention -- long before our EULA even existed. How is this the fault of Curious Labs ? And how does this make anyone in the community happy? DAZ had full intentions to continue developing products for Poser 4 and Poser 5 until the time and point that we read the Poser 5 EULA. We did not invent legal reasons to not support Poser 5. If you, yourself, do not see the problems in the agreement, then why have you alluded that you intend to change it? You stated above that the main reason for the changes in the P5 EULA is to protect the community and DAZ. If your motivation is merely to protect our data, then to make things easier I suggest that you just revert to the Poser 4 agreement and we will take our chances. I am sorry if all of these EULA issues have come up purely as a result of your efforts to look out for DAZ/Zygote (or to live up to your contractual obligations to protect that data) and have no other ill intentions.

You have also mentioned concerns that appear to question DAZs sincerity about the face room set-up of our models. Admittedly, we were developing our own application at that time. This does automatically mean that we would not continue developing models for Poser customers. The Millennium Dragon, Platinum Club and the upcoming Victoria 3 prove otherwise. We were 100% interested in having Victoria 3 Face Room compatible but just not at the price we were quoted. I think Diane brings up a good question: did Curious Labs try to negotiate the price quote from your attorney to fix the EULA, or did you feel that they were giving you a good faith estimate? Along the lines of what I mentioned before perhaps you may not have all of the information about what was communicated to DAZ from others in your company. When the price quote was given to us, we were told that if we did not have you guys do the work then the two engineers who had setup the other characters would be laid off. That seems to contradict what you said about needing to pull people off of other project to do this work.

Larry, I see the benefits of not making our differences everybody elses problems. As you know, these differences have their roots a long ways back . We even mentioned something about it last year during the whole amnesty situation. (see the attached link). But with that being said, I have no problem if any of our discussions and dealings with each other are made completely public. We have nothing to hide. The only problem I do have is when only one side of the fence is painted. When only partial information is given then it may require more information to show the whole picture. Like you, we also will step in to protect our companys reputation.

I do have a message for the community. DAZ is 100% committed to supporting the consumers. We know that it is because of you that we are able to stay in business. We are investing all of our resources to bringing more opportunities and options for you, the customers. We have learned that the harder we work to serve you, the more likely we are to survive these tough economic times. When this means that we need to support Poser we will. If it means creating options that dont require Poser, then we will do that also. But most likely it means that we need to do both. Another thing, There is no one asking for you to pick sides in these issues. You dont have to. You have the luxury of reaping the benefits of the products that any company offers you.

Sincerely,

Dan Farr
President, DAZ Productions

P.S. Can anybody think of a way to make all this a reality TV show? We could all split the proceeds.