Chris Cason wrote:
> FWIW there's some discusssion over in c.g.r.renderman about how pixar had
> sued Larry Gritz and the company he started (Exaluna), resulting in BMRT
> being withdrawn from the market (as well as Larry's new renderer). Plus
> Exaluna was bought by Nvidia.
> 

Same very topic was discussed a little bit in p.off-topic (thread 
"NVIDIA bought Exluna", dated 2002-07-23).
Sometimes I wondered, whether POV-Ray team held quite low profile (no 
cost, no support, restricted use by third-party tools etc.) for the very 
same reason: not to step to toes of some big company. Imagine, that 
someone wrote plugin for using POV-Ray as renderer for some modeller (or 
any other modelling package) and previous renderer provider feels like 
losing its income and tries to sue team, e.g. for patent infringement, 
as it's quite possible, that POV-Ray implements some patented algorithm(s).
Of course in case of Pixar vs. Exluna situation was quite complicated, 
as "core" people in Exluna were from Pixar and undoubtedly Pixar's folk 
had fear, that know-how, aquired in Pixar, was used against them.
I do hope, that Pixar won't go against other free/OS implementations of 
RenderMan....

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