... send flames to my personal e-mail address since it is OT in here just to
tell me that you hate me and what an idiot I am. Thanks!

Very interesting how many people feel personally insulted when asking about
pricing policy. :-)

To explain it a bit further: (for those who still read my posts)

.) PoV is a great freeware Raytracer and a very good piece of software,
documentation and support. The developers spend most of their spare time (I
guess) to keep the good work up. I really know what I'm speaking about since
I had to let die my Astronomy software due to the lack of time (with roughly
4 hours a week I couldn't really do much in complex astronomical
algorithms...).

.) it is not unusual that excellent freeware turnes to shareware at some
point to keep up web sites, support and development.

.) The PoV team has costs for newsgroup, web space, buying compilers, books
or what ever. Currently they try to cover that by selling IRTC CD's,
Keyrings (hey, I got mine yesterday!) and whatever. If this is enough and
PoV can stay for free, it would be -great-

.) If not, I wouldn't hesitate to buy PoV

Seeing all this at a glance I can not beleive that there were never, ever
some thoughts about pricing. The team calculates (has to calculate) the
costs and try to cover them. The (planned?) book is another good idea for
this. The team knows the costs and has a good feeling about the number of
the users. I am sure it is easy to calculate a price necessary to keep up
support ( if you count the -time- of the developers efforts it would be
unpayable)

But you all know this (even better than me, I guess) so why do I have to
explain it?

Just one thing I don't understand is, why people tell me that I am an idiot
if I do basic financial calculations and ask the developers about their
results?

regards
SY

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