> ... The core developers of the program
> are either professional programmers who work on if for fun in their spare
> time or are computer science students working on it to help develop their
> programming skills. That we as a public get to enjoy the fruits of their
> labor is secondary to that goal. With that in mind, the development model
> of POV-Ray is not clearly defined and is pretty much at the whim of the
> developers and whatever tickles their fancy at the time.

Hmm... I understand, but what I now wonder is
what happens when a critical mass of users have
made large investments in using POV-Ray.

Speaking hypothetically, let's say that all copies of POV-Ray
somehow vanished, along with any source code versions, and the
developers got tired of the whole thing as well. Essentially,
no more POV-Ray.

But there would be terabytes of POV-Ray scene files still left,
and tons of POV-Ray experience in its user base. So how much
time would elapse before someone would recreate it? I would
guess that a new POV-Team would spring up in a few days.

It's a weird extreme scenario, but I think it demonstrates
that at a certain point, a program's existence isn't
confined tightly to its development team. Intermediate
scenarios (e.g., the POV-Team decides on a radical change
that breaks half of all scene files, but another group instantly
springs up forking POV-Ray to preserve compatability, or
the backlash is so strong the POV-Team changes their minds)
would also demonstrate the same effect. It's similar to
what people notice about political leaders: yes, the people
at the top technically have absolute power, but in practice,
they do not.

Let's imagine another case: an outsider develops a really
popular patch. Nearly everyone loves it, but (again, hypothetically)
the POV-Team doesn't. What would happen? The code would be
forked and the majority of the user base would follow
whatever group managed the fork.

Here's a really disturbing thought: Like they did with
C/C++ and web browsing, Microsoft clones POV-Ray and
does the usual embrace and extend. They do a good enough
job that most of the user base eventually migrates all of its
files to use MS-POV (arrgh, I actually get queasy just
thinking about it :). As the years go by, the POV-Team is
left maintaining an increasingly incompatible and
not-as-powerful program. To most users, whatever code
the POV-Team is maintaining is no longer POV-Ray, because
they're not using that code anymore.

I'm not trying to sound weird or anything, but I
thought it would be interesting to ponder the
deeper nature of project ownership when the project
has reached a critical mass of users and legacy data.
I would say that it really does rest with the users; the
developers basically have no choice but to keep
doing what the users want, or risk having their
leadership given to others.

Ray

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