|
![](/i/fill.gif) |
Hookflash raises some interesting points:
- The API. The current restrictions on the API are derived from the
POV-Ray license. Many people have contributed code to POV-Ray under the
current license, and many of them are not easy to track down. The
POV-Team feels it would be a disservice to those who contributed code
under the current license to rerelease that code under a less
restrictive license. The rewrite for 4.0 may give us the opportunity to
revise the license significantly. Or not. We'll see.
- The POV-Team needing more programmers. It has previously been
suggested that the POV-Ray development code base be made available
through CVS. I see this as possibly a good idea for 4.0, which would
benefit from a large number of eyes. Currently we're using a
proprietary version control product, and I don't know that it would be
so easy to give client licenses to the entire world. I feel that moving
to a new version control product this late in 3.5 development would just
get in the way of 3.5.
- Interaction between the POV-Team and the community. As has been
pointed out, most of the active members of the POV-Team post on this
server regularly. While the documentation has generally had something
of a "buzz off and leave us alone" quality to it, that's mostly to keep
each of the POV-Team members from getting crushed under a bunch of email
that might best be served by povray.newusers. That's why we wrote Ken.
;-) I know it goes against what the documentations says, but I'm eager
to talk with anyone who is trying to compile POV-Ray under an officially
unsupported version of Unix. I actually enjoy getting email from
POV-Ray users about such things. One of the finest examples of
developer-community interaction is at http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/,
which is Alan Cox's diary. For those who are unaware, Alan Cox is
basically second-in-command of the Linux kernel, and he keeps an
(almost) daily web diary of what he's up to. One day he's merging
patches, another he's writing a device driver, and another he's watching
rugby. Movies, evenings out, and conferences also come up. His wife
keeps a parallel diary, describing the hour of the afternoon when Alan
got out of bed, the time he spent watching Scooby Doo, that sort of
thing. It's all quite charming, and I wish I had the time to dedicate
to something like that. Maybe someday I will. However, I don't expect
the POV-Team will ever make any sort of policy requiring that we set up
something like JenniCam to keep us under a watchful eye. ;-)
-Mark Gordon
Post a reply to this message
|
![](/i/fill.gif) |