Jacopo Pantaleoni, the programmer of lightflow, wrote me the fellowing
email. I decided to post it.
"..and, if you want, post this message on the group.. (Jacopo Pantaleoni)"

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Hi Jurek,

I have read your discussion.

I must say that I don't agree with all the messages
that have been exposed against my license.

The concept upon which it is based is rather simple.
If you want to use it for purely artistic purposes,
you don't have to pay for it. But if you want to
use it for commercial reasons, well, then you have
to wait for the commercial version, that will have
a cost, exactly as ALL the other commercial softwares.

In my humble opinion, this is the right distribution
politics, that should be adopted by every non Open Source
software.

It grants hobbists the right to use the software without
have to pay huge amounts of money, but, at the same time,
it grants me the right to sell my work.
Why should anyone be able to sell his art (in the form
of pictures), and then want me to give my own for free ?
I can't really understand it...

Lightflow is the fruit of hard work, and I want its
development to become my job. Is it wrong ?

Please let me know what do you think about it
(and, if you want, post this message on the group).

As regards cooperation with POV-Ray Team, someone
said that I have been in contact with them, but
I don't remember it.
If my memory is not burn out (well, this could also
be possible :) I have never had the pleasure to meet
anyone of them...

Even if I think that a cooperation would not be possible
now, because I am developing a commercial software,
this does not mean that we would not be able to speak
freely.

After all, I have been a POV-Ray user too, and I have
always thought that the POV Team has made a marvellous
piece of software... I have not made Lightflow because
I feel superior: I have made it because I wanted to
gain insight in photorealistic rendering and... because
I was very curious to see some features that POV did not
possess, such as programmable shading, trimmed NURBS,
displacement mapping and hypertextures...

Apart from this, my admiration to the POV-Ray Team!
They have started much time before me, and they have
been real pioneers.
Perhaps, without them I would have never started
anything, because I would have been a classic GUI user,
and I would have never coded my very first 3d software:
a landscape generator that exported to POV... ;)

Best Regards,
Jacopo
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