On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 08:05:24 +0100, Christoph Hormann wrote:

> that are published as platform specific binaries
> and are not licensed under the POV-Ray license (simply because it violates
> the letter and the spirit of the license).

I was going to start out by saying something to the effect that I didn't
remember anyone suggesting that such plugins would/should be binary-only,
and then it suddenly hit me as to why this seems like a bad idea to those
with more experience than I.

If such extensions were to be published in source form, then why would
there be a need for a plugin?  Why not just add the code to the POV-Ray
codebase directly in source format?  If the proposed extension were such a
good idea, then linking as a library actually *doesn't* make sense,
because that would complicate the code unnecessarily when the SDL language
could be extended directly (either in an official build or an unofficial
build) to add the new object type.

Consider the lightbulb turned on here - and thank you for mentioning the
"letter and spirit of the license" in your post.  *That* makes perfect
sense, rather than the approach others have taken in just
essentially saying "this is the way it is, deal with it."

Jim

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