MASSFORGE: By Your Command!

As many of you may know, MASSIVE, the artificial life-based multi-agent simulation system developed by Stephen Regulous and used in Peter Jackson's recent films of The Lord of The Rings, now licenses for $18000.

This cost, while perhaps reasonable for your typical studio, is rather prohibitive for some independent filmmakers and most amateur fan film producers, even those who would gladly shell out a few hundred dollars for Maya (or use Blender). Seeing as Jackson was touted as having opened new horizons "beyond Hollywood" with the LoTR movies, I thought we might go one better and think about bringing MASSIVE to the masses. Or, to be less patent-infringey, as Willow might say: bringing large-scale A-life, agent management, herding, and hierarchical character and population modeling for photorealistic CGA to the desktop, or a render farm near you.

So... without further ado: What do you all think of an open-source, production-quality CG agents package? Would you join a dev team for such a project if, say, there were a few developers (promising students, for example) working on the infrastructure?