(I don't know quite what to quote here; those following the thread will 
presumably know what I'm responding to, so hopefully I'll be forgiven.)

All I can do here is reiterate things that others have said, in the hope 
that one of us will be able to make you see or agree with something 
where the others fail. With that said, I'm going to take a different 
tack from the people protesting on moral grounds, and go straight to the 
practical argument.

Rune, who do you think is going to pay you for commercial use of your 
particle system (or indeed anything else that you add to POV-Ray's bag 
of tricks)? Professional CG artists are far more likely to use 3DSMAX or 
Maya or something; they're not going to pay you for some "useless" bit 
of POV script. People like Gilles Tran aren't going to pay you; they'll 
just not use your work. And then there are the people like me - 
unashamed software pirates - who would happily use your work and not 
give you a dime or a shred of credit, in the belief that information is 
inherently free and that artificial limitations on its freedom can and 
should be ignored.

When you get right down to it, do you *really* have any customers at 
all? And even if you had, say, four or five, would their small financial 
contributions really be worth the time you spent making your particle 
system? Would they justify the fact that almost no one else is using 
your code for anything? Would their contributions be more valuable than 
free third-party improvements to your code?

One other thing (and here I dip into the moral argument): if you feel 
that people are entitled to monetary compensation for their intellectual 
work if others use it for financial gain, then how have you compensated 
others for *their* intellectual work, which *you* are now using for 
commercial gain? Have you paid the members of the POV Team for their 
work in creating and maintaining POV-Ray? Have you donated money to keep 
this news server running, and did you pay for ad space to advertise your 
product? Have you sent off checks to the people whose work on particle 
systems you probably used in making your own, and the people who 
published that work? Did you pay posters here for any suggestions or 
help they might have given you?

If not, then you're a hypocrite, and you deserve to have your work 
stolen from you and used without compensation, just as you have used 
others' resources without compensation.

-Xplo

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