Hookflash raises some interesting points:

- The API.  The current restrictions on the API are derived from the
POV-Ray license.  Many people have contributed code to POV-Ray under the
current license, and many of them are not easy to track down.  The
POV-Team feels it would be a disservice to those who contributed code
under the current license to rerelease that code under a less
restrictive license. The rewrite for 4.0 may give us the opportunity to
revise the license significantly.  Or not.  We'll see.

- The POV-Team needing more programmers.  It has previously been
suggested that the POV-Ray development code base be made available
through CVS.  I see this as possibly a good idea for 4.0, which would
benefit from a large number of eyes.  Currently we're using a
proprietary version control product, and I don't know that it would be
so easy to give client licenses to the entire world.  I feel that moving
to a new version control product this late in 3.5 development would just
get in the way of 3.5.

- Interaction between the POV-Team and the community.  As has been
pointed out, most of the active members of the POV-Team post on this
server regularly.  While the documentation has generally had something
of a "buzz off and leave us alone" quality to it, that's mostly to keep
each of the POV-Team members from getting crushed under a bunch of email
that might best be served by povray.newusers.  That's why we wrote Ken.
;-) I know it goes against what the documentations says, but I'm eager
to talk with anyone who is trying to compile POV-Ray under an officially
unsupported version of Unix.  I actually enjoy getting email from
POV-Ray users about such things.  One of the finest examples of
developer-community interaction is at http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/,
which is Alan Cox's diary.  For those who are unaware, Alan Cox is
basically second-in-command of the Linux kernel, and he keeps an
(almost) daily web diary of what he's up to.  One day he's merging
patches, another he's writing a device driver, and another he's watching
rugby.  Movies, evenings out, and conferences also come up.  His wife
keeps a parallel diary, describing the hour of the afternoon when Alan
got out of bed, the time he spent watching Scooby Doo, that sort of
thing.  It's all quite charming, and I wish I had the time to dedicate
to something like that.  Maybe someday I will.  However, I don't expect
the POV-Team will ever make any sort of policy requiring that we set up
something like JenniCam to keep us under a watchful eye.  ;-)

-Mark Gordon

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