Dear Thorsten,

I respect your position with regard to Povray licensing. I will limit myself
to
one last comment.

It would be nice if the Povray team took a clearer position with respect
to Povray licensing (instead of saying "we don't discuss this").
If it were clear that Povray would never be OSI compatible then this could
provide an incentive for people
to (try to) write an open source replacement. Obviously this would be a
complete waste of time if the Povray team has the intention of open
sourcing Povray anyway.

Best regards,
Michel

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> The 3.5 license seemed to indicate that a rewrite was underway of the parts
> of Povray with unknown author. In the 3.6 license this part has gone. I was
> just curious why this was the case.

Because it doesn't belong in the license.

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[this is directed at all readers, not just the original poster].

While we as a rule do not make comments on upcoming versions, I will
on this occasion make the following statement. Please do not attempt
to elicit further information from me regarding this.

POV-Ray version 4.0 will be under a different license. Yes, we will
have replaced the parts of the source that we cannot re-license. No,
I cannot tell you what license we will use, and nor am I looking (at
this time) for suggestions as to which to choose. At the appropriate
time I will raise a thread on the subject. Going into a discussion of
it right now would be counter-productive as I am very busy with other
issues.

-- Chris Cason
   POV-Team Co-ordinator

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"vdbergh" <vdb### [at] lucacbe> wrote in message
news:web.4152b69ca8ee334f5c3acc940@news.povray.org...
>
> Dear Thorsten,
>
> I respect your position with regard to Povray licensing. I will limit
myself
> to
> one last comment.
>
> It would be nice if the Povray team took a clearer position with respect
> to Povray licensing (instead of saying "we don't discuss this").

I see a valid reason for not discussing potential future changes. There is
no way to tell if and when it will happen, so it's sort of a waste of what
limited time the povray volunteers have. It seems they will be happy (or
unhappy, but willing none the less ;) to discuss the current license.

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In article <web.4152b69ca8ee334f5c3acc940@news.povray.org> , "vdbergh" 
<vdb### [at] lucacbe> wrote:

> It would be nice if the Povray team took a clearer position with respect
> to Povray licensing (instead of saying "we don't discuss this").
> If it were clear that Povray would never be OSI compatible then this could
> provide an incentive for people to (try to) write an open source replacement.

You are welcome to write one. It would not be the first attempt. But if you
look around, you will quickly discover what happened to all previous
attempts.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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Warp wrote:

>   As noted in many places, distributing POV-Ray under the GPL license
> is problematic because the pov-team has no permission for that. They
> do not own the source code of POV-Ray completely because it has not
> been made completely by them, and they have been unable to locate and
> get explicit permission from all the contributors who have written
> parts of the POV-Ray source during its entire 10+ years history.

Warp has it exactly right. The original authors of the code included
in POV-Ray retain copyright rights to that code. As copyright holders,
they are the only ones who legally can specify license rights to that
code. The POV-Team members who happen *not* to be copyright holders
have no legal right to change the license terms of that code.
(As Warp also points out, if the POV-Team were able to contact each
and every code copyright holder and get them to stipulate licensing
under, for example, the GPL, then yes, they could generate a GPL
release of the program. For now, though, they have no right to do that.)



-- 
Steve Martin, CPBE CBNT

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"vdbergh" <vdb### [at] lucacbe> wrote:

> If it were clear that Povray would never be OSI compatible then this could
> provide an incentive for people
> to (try to) write an open source replacement. Obviously this would be a
> complete waste of time if the Povray team has the intention of open
> sourcing Povray anyway.

Surely there are already raytracers about that are OSI compatible. "Yafray"
for instance seems to be released under an OSI compatible license, and that
took only a five-second google search to find.

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