Gilles Tran wrote:

> 470b46cb$1@news.povray.org...
>> Welcome to the povray.object-collection newsgroup. This newsgroup has been 
>> set up to support discussions about the POV-Ray Object Collection web site 
>> which is now live at http://lib.povray.org. The web site stores POV-Ray 
>> and Moray objects contributed by the community under the Creative Commons 
>> LGPL license to allow royalty free use, modification and redistribution.
> 
> Is the LGPL the only license accepted? All that I have is already under CC 
> By Attribution (which I find more suitable for artwork), and, in one case, 
> under public domain.
> 
> G.
> 
> 

There were actually two problems with putting different files under
different licenses. The first was simple, distributing the library as a
whole. If one was just CC-BY-NC and another CC-BY-SA they could only be
distributed as a single group under CC-BY-SA-NC, I believe. It would get
even worse if some people wanted to share their contributions under the
GPL. The option for this would be to have separate portions under each
license. This may still be an option later.

The other problem was public domain. I wish I still had the references
to copyright law, but I'll have to go on memory alone so I'm bound to
get some details wrong. Putting a work in the public domain differs by
the country. I remember reading that, for someone in the USA, to place a
work in the public domain they needed to create the work with the intent
of placing it in the public domain or otherwise go through some paper
work assigning the work to the public. A simple statement of 'I release
this work into the public domain' was not always valid. Since this
differs by country, what one person releases to the public domain might
not actually be in the public domain in another country. While I trust
that all the people here wouldn't do something so nasty as use this to
cause problems, I don't believe that everyone would be so well behaved.
All it would take is one crazy lawyer.

Admittedly, one lawyer might be all it takes to hack away at the GPL.
But that is someone else's problem.

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