Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> First, is it expected that POV-Ray 4.0 will be mostly upward compatible 
> in the SDL with 3.x? That is, are all the macros on povray.org right now 
> going to need to be written completely, or just tweaked?

  What kind of backwards-compatibility will pov4 support is to be seen,
but you should be aware that the current SDL is just not good. It's a
hack over a hack over a hack, which very limited and also extremely
slow (and very difficult to optimize faster). While the new scripting
language should (IMO) resemble somewhat the current SDL, it would not
be quite wise to drag support for the current SDL, except perhaps in
a kind of import mode.

> Secondly, if the people doing POV-Ray 4.0 are the same people who have 
> been working on the 3.x release, what reason is there to believe that 
> this'll make it possible to change the license if it isn't possible now? 

  3.x contains code made by people 10 years ago which cannot be reached
anymore. Their code cannot be published under a license they didn't
agree to.
  POV-Ray 4 will be completely rewritten by the current developers
which can agree to a new license.

> IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that in the USA at least, POV-Ray 4.0 would 
> be considered a derivative work of POV-Ray 3.x, particularly if it's 
> done by the same people.

  If a code is rewritten and looks completely different, it doesn't
matter if it does the same thing as the old code. The new code will
be copyrighted by the new programmer.

-- 
#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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