On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 21:24:25 GMT, Jeff Lee wrote:
>If someone wants to alter them, they're more than welcome to do so for
>their own use.  If they think their improvements are worthy of
>distributing, it would be nice if they would let *me* know about them,
>so that I can include their ideas, give them credit, and not have a
>bunch of possibly incompatible "unofficial" versions floating around.

That's fair.  Just wondered what your reasoning was is all.

>> That's far more restrictive than even POVLegal, and a fair number
>> of people already chafe at its constraints.
>
>POV-Ray is the POV Team's intellectual property, and they've put a LOT
>of work into it.  They have a right to ask that people abide by their
>wishes concerning distribution, incorporation of their code into other
>packages, and so forth.  I certainly don't think they're being
>unreasonable, but then again, I'm a computer programmer who has had code
>used without permission -- or credit -- by others who didn't have the
>decency to *ask*.

Whoa!  Didn't mean to incite a flamewar here.  For reasons that should
become obvious, I'm one of the people who says that whatever the POV-Team
wants to do with their code is their business, as I've said all along.
I do wish some parts of POVLegal would die a quiet death, as I don't see
them contributing in any significant way to keeping POV and its code free, 
but that's an entirely privately held opinion and I defer to the Team's
decision makers to have the final word on that.

I just wondered what made you decide on the license you did rather than 
using something like the GPL or BSD licenses or, as I unwittingly did, 
completely omitting any licensing language.  As you may have guessed, 
I'm also a computer programmer, but I've never been taken advantage of
to my knowledge.  But then, I tend to release anything I don't get paid
for either into the public domain or under some license or other (such
as POVLegal, which applies to the superpatch and my other POV-derived
works.)

>I also hope that this "fair number of people" doesn't include the ones
>who are incensed that GeoCities seems to have decided to help itself to
>its members' intellectual property...  That would certainly be ironic.

It's one thing to feel that the terms on a given piece of IP are too
strict for the accomplishment of the stated goals (and again I stress that
that is my private opinion, not anyone else's) and it's another thing 
entirely to ascribe so little value to the idea of IP that you wouldn't be 
incensed by what Yahoo! has done (unwittingly, I think, in that the TOS in
question has always applied to the older Yahoo! services like chat and 
member profiles.  They probably didn't even realize the impact of such a 
thing on a site like GeoCities.)  I think it's not a bit hypocritical to
hold both the view that Yahoo! screwed up and the view that POVLegal isn't
as lean as it could be.  I'm certainly not advocating stealing IP, as 
Yahoo! seems to be doing, and I have no problem working within the 
constraints of whatever licensing scheme the POV-Team wants to construct,
but at the same time I wish the constraints were a tad looser.

>> I haven't succeeded in downloading your file,
>
>Is the FTP server acting up again?  If so, I'll move it to my Web
>directories and change the link to HTTP access.

I did finally get it.  It was just slow. Obviously a lot of people wanted 
it all at once. :)  It really is quite nicely done.

>I have tried, based on your response to my question about that very
>problem, but was unable to get it working.  The macros are... somewhat
>ugly, unfortunately, and will require a complete rewrite in order to
>make this method implementable.

Hm... maybe if I get bored with all my other POV projects I'll see if I
can mess with yours. :)  I read through it and it looks quite readable, 
by comparison with e.g. my torus spline macro.

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