Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> And how many contributions have there been in the past five months? - Ah,
> yes, thousands and I missed them all :-(
> 
> So I can show that there have been no major contributions in five months,
> and you can show nothing about the past three years. My argument is based
> on facts, your argument is pure speculation. - Hmm, I guess I have the
> better argument after all. And believe me, I would be quite a bit happier
> if I didn't have such a strong argument...

Maybe the POV-Team policy made the potential contributors go away.
Open-source developers are not manpower that you can rent for free when you
want. People have to feel implicated in the project, and may sometime be
playing with the code for months or years before doing any usefull
contribution. When the code is sometime available, sometime not, when
people are rough if you ask why POV-Ray is not GPL, then potential
contributors can't feel implicated and will go away. Usually, when I need a
feature in free software I am using, I implement it myself. It was not
possible with POV-Ray since source code was not available at the time I
needed it (in 2006-2007).

Why didn't I do it since the beta code release? Because it was too long for
me and I switched to Kerkythea (which is not precisely "open", but fits my
needs) in the meantime, after having used POV-ray for 8 years.

I am not complaining at all and am quite happy with this situation now. I
just wanted to underline that when the POV-Team repeats "3.7 will be ready
when it will be ready" because of a lack of manpower, well, they know why.

-a.

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