Ray Gardener wrote:
> 
> The fund raising covers the public's purchase of the intellectual 
> properties plus some post-release work and support that will need to be 
> provided for devs, new users and existing users. Plus I want to code 
> comment and furnish the design docs to a professional level.

I have quite a problem with this "public buying intellectual property" 
(but this isn't specific to this case, i had the same with Blender for 
example).  First of all it's "buying the cat in the sack".  And then the 
idea of open source (IMO, others might see this differently) is that 
making the software open source is of benefit for everyone involved.  By 
requiring 'the public' to buy it free you essentially say in this 
particular case (in comparison to all the other open source software 
that exists) the benefit is more on the public side so you require a 
compensation.  Whether or not this is justified for Leveller i can't 
really judge.

> I don't 
> want this turning into a repeat of HF-Lab/HLA/KLevel.

Hmm.  I always thought Leveller had a different intention than those 
projects (although they might claim they have the same intention as 
Leveller :-)).

HF-Lab etc. seem mainly pure interactive heightfield editors/generators 
and this is not much needed any more, let alone commercially viable 
because of several reasons:

- support for higher color depth in general imaging programs, you don't 
need to learn a new program to do simple heightfield sculpturing.
- increasing detail requirements make it less viable to edit 
heightfields interactively as a whole and make heightfields less 
interesting as a modelling concept for artificial terrain.

Now the idea of Leveller to me seems to be more than a pure heightfield 
editor.  I am not sure if this or better code/documentation/professional 
support etc. make a difference but this will be interesting to see.

> 
> You mean "if" right? The future isn't written yet.

Of course.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Landscape of the week:
http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/ (Last updated 24 Jul. 2005)
MegaPOV with mechanics simulation: http://megapov.inetart.net/

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