Florian Pesth <fpe### [at] compuservede> wrote:
> Is there a chance that future versions of POVRay (beyond 3.5) will get
> released under the GPL or the LGPL, and why not?
> What are the problems with such a license?

  The GPL license has its own problems. In some ways it's so anarchist, that
it can actually be a totalitarian license.
  LGPL is really nice (and a sign of this is that many GPL guys hate it),
however, it can be a bit *too* free (eg. publishing POV-Ray under LGPL would
allow anyone to make money by selling a program which has POV-Ray linked
in it, for example being the main renderer in the program; it's not very
nice that people would exploit POV-Ray in this way).

> I don't have a problem to
> contribute to "non-free software" if there are good reasons for not
> releasing it under such a license.

  I don't understand how POV-Ray is "non-free". Could someone explain?

> BTW is a Java Raytracer not slower by nature?

  There's no way an interpreted language can be as fast as a compiled and
highly optimized language.
  Compiling the Java code to native machine code *might* make it reach
the same speed, but I doubt that it will ever do that.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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