> I appreciate this discussion, so please don't hesitate to pursue your
> arguments further. It is not totally out of the question that I might
> make changes to some of the terms... :)


Heh, I'll give this a shot then. =)

Mainly, the only argument I have is a moral one. You have every right to ask
for compensation for commercial use. However, the whole thing about POV-Ray
itself is that it's free. If it weren't free, we wouldn't have the community
here that we do. We have people who use it for all different reasons, from
those just playing around to those using it professionally. It's the
*essence* of our community that there are no strings attached. We're all
just having fun with a program we like to use, and contributing to it in
some cases for no reason other than the benefit of the community. Heck,
there's even povlegal.doc that prohibits the use of the program
commercially.

Now, while this legal restriction doesn't apply to scene files themselves,
the *spirit* of POV-Ray and the POV-Ray community does. By asking for
something in return for your contribution, you're partially destroying that
spirit. Just like the rest of us, you learned a lot from this community and
from your use of POV-Ray over the years, and, most likely, you wouldn't have
been able to write those include files if it weren't for the fact that the
creators of the program let anyone use it for free, for any purpose. The
compensation we *all* get for contributing to the program is the
contributions of others. That, plus the fact that when someone else uses
your work, it makes you feel good. That's why I'm working on my little patch
right now; not in the hope of making a few bucks, but in the hope that
someone else will use it and think it's cool.

So, I think that's the best argument I can propose. I don't feel comfortable
using your particle system since it puts a restriction on me that if,
sometime in the future, I'm making an image for some commercial software,
and I reuse some of my old POV-Ray code that makes use of your particle
system, I'll have to resolve that issue.

It really is excellent. Just keep it free. =)

 - Slime
[ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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