In article <3D4### [at] comtradeee>,
 Vahur Krouverk <vkr### [at] comtradeee> wrote:

> Same very topic was discussed a little bit in p.off-topic (thread 
> "NVIDIA bought Exluna", dated 2002-07-23).
> Sometimes I wondered, whether POV-Ray team held quite low profile (no 
> cost, no support, restricted use by third-party tools etc.) for the very 
> same reason: not to step to toes of some big company. Imagine, that 
> someone wrote plugin for using POV-Ray as renderer for some modeller (or 
> any other modelling package) and previous renderer provider feels like 
> losing its income and tries to sue team, e.g. for patent infringement, 
> as it's quite possible, that POV-Ray implements some patented algorithm(s).

    I'm quite sure that if they saw some benefit in it, there are some 
companies that could go after the POV Team. There are so many stupid 
patents out there that it is probably impossible to write a major piece 
of graphics software without violating a few. One of the tesselation 
patches infringes on the patent on the marching cubes algorithm. That 
Pixar patent seemed (as far as I could tell, I'm no expert) to apply to 
anything that used randomized sampling, so it could cover media, 
radiosity, focal blur, scenes that use averaged textures with different 
normals, jitter in the antialiasing, area lights, or photons...

    There must be quite a few patents that could be interpreted as 
applying to other things in the official version. And most attempts to 
use these patents against POV would be utterly rediculous but very 
costly to fight. (when did patents go from a protection to a weapon?)

-- 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>
POV-Ray TAG e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
TAG web site: http://tag.povray.org/

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