Tom York wrote:

> I'm not sure you can prove this assertion that most people are put off by
> licence issues.
> 
> I would guess that the combination of a small number of people who are
> interested in the first place (how many renderer programmers are there?),
> a complex codebase, and source access issues (e.g. effort in fixing
> defects in 25b source could well be wasted when the binaries are on beta
> 27) would limit the pool of recruits.

Being myself a developer involved in some free/opensource/whatever projects
and being knowledgeable in the field of parallel programming, I would have
been interested in playing with POV-Ray some months ago. But the
time-limited beta with no source code, the hostile messages to potential
opensource contributors treated as FSF-ayatollahs, and the "you may develop
a patch if you want, but it is already obsoleted by unreleased code"
attitude let me go away.

I have no proof for my assertion. I am aware that I only speak for myself.
However, the fact is that PVM-POV and the MPI patch are unmaintained, and
the multithreaded version has been beta for years, when others (Indigo,
Kerkythea, Pixie, Yafray,...) are all multithreaded (even without being
GPL).

Specialist in parallel programming would have been a great addition in the
POV-Team, but the current strategy let me believe that external
contributors are not welcome.

-a.

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