nemesis wrote:
> "Chris B" <c_b### [at] btconnectcomnospam> wrote:
>> I think that licensing is the thing that needs most discussion. One option
>> is for each person to define their own license and include information
>> within their submission about the terms of their license.
> 
> I believe this would be too cumbersome and eligible to many legal nitpicks.
> 
>> I would rather see a standard license that would cover this entire
>> collection
> 
> me too!
me three

I have different opinions about how the includes and scenes might be
licensed. For clarity, I think of includes as collections of single
objects, textures, macros, lighting patterns, just about anything made
mostly of #declares and meant to be reused. Scenes would be the
individual artistic expression, possibly made up of items from the
include. Clear as mud, and probably open to legal nit-picking.

>> and I think the main candidates are:
>>   o  The POV-Ray license
> 
> the problem with this one is:  wouldn't we fall into the same problem we
> have with povray license today, where people who previously contributed
> code to povray itself are unreacheable and thus the license has to remain
> the same until the planned 4.0 rewrite?  I mean, if i submit a povray scene
> which comes included with povray and is licensed under the current povray
> license, will it be able to be included in next povray releases in case of
> license change that reveals itself conflicting with the previous license?
> Unless we explicitely stated that the scenes are licensed under current or
> future povray licenses.
> 

The way I read things, scenes are not licensed for re-use unless they
are in the incdemo folder. I don't know where to look to see what the
terms of donating a scene are.

While the includes could easily be added to POV-Ray, probably without
changing the license by just adding them into the INCLUDE folder, I
don't know that any scenes could be. Legalese isn't even my second
language, but the usage provisions seem to say that anything in
scenes/incdemo is free to reuse or distribute, while the other scenes
are not. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground available. Either
the new includes would have to be added to the normal package in the
proper folders, or the POV-Ray license would have to be changed /
rewritten to account for the packaged includes being distributed outside
of the normal package. That would fall into the Yet Another License
category.

>>   o  A Creative Commons License (see
>> http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses)
>>   o  Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication
>> (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/)
> 
> This could be nice, specially since they're stabilished liberal licenses
> that exist well outside of povray's realm.  I would also put the GPL or BSD
> licenses under consideration.  The BSD is the classical liberal license,
> allowing the code to be used for any purposes, by anyone.  The GPL is the
> one conclaiming people modifying GPLed code to also distribute the
> modifications IF redistributing the modified binary.  In the case of povray
> scenes, i guess if people modify a pov scene and distribute the modified
> generated jpg or png, they should also distribute the modifications to the
> source scene file.  I don't know how compatible the GPL is to the povray
> distribution so that eventual GPLed include files could be distributed with
> it.
> 

I think that 'distributing' would need to be clarified a little with
regard to images. Is hosting a jpg of a GPL scene distributing? Is
printing a hard copy of a scene, which is a derivative of a binary
representation, distributing if it is given to someone else?

I'd be more partial to an LGPL style license for any includes, over the
normal GPL, for reasons like the following. If someone creates a scene
using one of the proposed new includes, which could be anything from
vector transforms to colors to anything else, when would they need to
provide access to the source of the scene? If they hosted it online, or
ran off a hard copy that they sold, or had Zazzle sell copies of it? If
the scene is theirs, why would the include need to affect the license of
the final scene?

For scenes I think I would prefer stricter terms. I know I would be
annoyed to see my scenes turn up in someone else's Zazzle store unmodified.

>>   o  A custom license covering this collection
> 
> i'm really against Yet Another License For The Sake of It...

Some derivative of the normal POV-Ray license, possibly co-licensed
under GPL or LGPL or anything else, would not quite be 'Yet Another
License' but might cover all of the bases. And it might allow for what
ever license change takes place with 4.0 or later.

> 
>> My view is that having an area on povray.org where all of the contributions
>> can be re-used without any preconditions (or with a very minimal agreed
>> standard set) would be good for POV-Ray and would make an important
>> differentiator for this collection over other object and include file sites.
>> This would also mean that the POV-Ray community could freely enhance these
>> contributions over the years without having to get permission from previous
>> contributors who may now be uncontactable.
> 
> In other worlds, kind of the typical open-source project source repository.
> This sounds really nice.  And should sound nice to povray maintainers as
> well, since code contributions for povray includes eventually getting into
> the distribution itself would be maintained by the community themselves. :)
> 
>> The downside is that it may
>> discourage some contributors from submitting their work.
> 
> I don't believe it would discourage people any more than today when no such
> provision exists and it would even clarify legal issues so everyone would
> benefit.
> 
> 
> 

Having a defined set of rules and requirements might encourage people to
reuse some code instead of reinventing it. As it stands right now, I
hesitate to go through the posted scene files looking for things similer
to anything I am working on. Since only a few that I've seen have
licenses in them, I would believe that all the rest are not licensable
and I wouldn't want to accidentally reuse some little trick or function
I happened to read. While I don't think most people here would fuss over
a simple texture on one rock in a scene, someone might and it's just
easier to reinvent everything.

And if the rules allow or require changes to get put back into the
repository, then we might even end up with better results since things
could be built up instead of reinvented.

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