I see nothing in the competition rules to prevent the use of other tools.
You still don't seem to be getting what part of the argument I'm spefically trying to put to rest. The idea that free software does not have enough revenue to hire good programmers and all good programmers will flock to the nonfree products, which was essentially your entire argument in your small rant against free software and why you view it as useless in this industry.
I've simply been trying to get you to see that this is not the case, a fact which you've been avoiding... which unfortunately has increased my annoyance. My apologies on that.
As to my goals for this thread, your right, and as I stated in my third post to the topic (it was actually already about maya) I was more aiming to see if anyone else was planning on using open-source or Free tools for their animation. So yes, the thread may be slightly mistitled. As you see there though, other than a slight rant against the horrendous crippling done on the free student version, I was fairly open to hear of about how maya was being used as well. (I even went so far as too check the prices on Maya again to see if it was vaugely worth it compared to just hunting out the appropriate python scripts.) Besides, no features seem to be anything I need that I can't get...
The funny part is even the guy that previously discussed maya on this thread seems to have been against you these last few posts... it seems I'm not the only one who felt that you had an attitude and was making some allegations that were not true.
So yes, if your fine with it, I'm happy to leave this flamewar be and spend time calling corporations to ensure our team has the funds needed to travel this year instead.
Oh, and photoshop has run fine on linux for some time now... yes, the windows version.