This is a 10 foot dive to retrieve a baby who's fallen into a pool. A couple bite marks is much easier to deal with than a death. With a dog trained to do this, then you can bet he/she can do much.

An interesting thing about spore is that it uses a proprietary version of puredata (puredata.info) to enable rapid prototyping of the Spore audio engine (search the pd listserv). I think it's called EAPD. Unlike Max/MSP, Pd runs the interface and the audio/dsp engine in separate processes, enabling headless patch execution.
The rest of this thread should still be somewhere in the archives- I've pasted a bit on the license issue:
onsidering that I have had to deal with this legal minefield, I can say the following:

        Work with Miller to understand what is covered by the BSD license (not all of it is)
        There are a number of "game engine" issues which you need to address when using Pd (this is at the technical/code level)
        Don't worry about the patches. Any game is going to have encryption and other copy protection stuff on it.

Please don't ask me to comment on the details of how PD has been/is being used. However, if you want to talk about the theory of PD being used in games, especially on a certain game console which I care about :-) then ask away...

    Note: if you are dealing with a game publisher on the legal aspects of PD, then it is likely that my company has enough legal agreements with them for me to talk about concrete uses of PD. Let me know in private email.

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Senior Manager, Developer Support
SCEA