My comments:

Creative Commons sounds useful and could be a way to go. I haven't looked at
what implications it has in detail though.

GPL would be out since anyone using a GPL'd include in their scene could
potentially then have to release their entire scene under the GPL. Whatever
license is chosen must not have the effect of coercing associated works into
the same license. LGPL might be a possibility.

For include files we basically (it seems to me) have several broad categories:

  a) Purely declarative includes, such as colors.inc;
  b) Functional (but still declarative) includes, such as for example
     a macro that given a location and time returns the position of the sun;
  c) 'Artistic' includes; by this I mean an include file that provides some
     sort of object, or a texture/material/etc. Basically something that we
     would categorize as more the work of an artist than a programmer.
and
  d) Combinations of the above - e.g. a tree growing include could be a
     combination of (b) and (c) above.

The reason I make this distinction is that traditionally art and code have
been considered different things and generally have different licences. In
POV-Ray, the two tend to merge since SDL is a co-ordinated blend of both art
and function.

It may be that there is no one existing license (other than POV's own) that
fits all our needs. However in a pinch we could probably say that any POV
source file is considered program code since SDL is what we parse, and as
such a program-oriented license may be more suitable. But if so, not one that
refers exclusively to 'executables' since the includes aren't that.

-- Chris Cason

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