FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
They will be based on real questions. Please e-mail me your questions at 4dblue@4dblue.com, and I will try to answer them here if they are pertinent to everyone.
Why "4D Blue" is not an open source project?
Some have already asked me this question, and I know more will as the project gains attention. And here is the reason behind the decision to keep the project closed source.
Open source projects tend to progress rather slowly. Let's look at POV-Ray. It's a great ray-tracer that has been around for ten years. One would expect it to be much more advanced by now, but it is not. MegaPOV is a popular branch out of it, but a quick look at their website reveals that the last update was done in mid-September of 2004.
There are good reasons why open source projects take so long. The primary one is the lack of well defined leadership. There is hardly anyone who makes the decision, and thus the decision-making process usually takes quite a while. Second, the contributions to the source are made by different people and the style is rarely consistent. Third, the software developer needs to be on the watch for users that may introduce new bugs while users are involved in learning the program. As a result, the process of introducing new code into the main branch is painfully slow. After all, the software developer cannot let users to add new code without any verification, because the build would be always broken and consistently unstable. Furthermore, no one feels 100% responsible for anything, and very few people see the big picture.
I can avoid these pitfalls by working alone, and advance at an unprecedented pace. I began working on "4D Blue" in May of 2004. And in eight months, I have a substantial modeling, animation and rendering package with more than 200,000 lines of source code. Clearly some of the code repeats itself in the constructors, and a lot is UI related, but it is still an impressive number. If it was an open source project, it would take years for it to reach the current state.
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