Darren New wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
>> but just want to cause arguments about the definition of "free software".
> 
> It worked. ;-)

ROFL - Indeed it did :-)

	Thorsten

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Warp  wrote in message <487e8a2f@news.povray.org>:
>   He is the author of the software. He *owns* the software.

That is a common misconception. Holding a copyright has nothing to do with
owning. The copyright lobbies try to have us believe the opposite, using the
misleading expression "intellectual property", because we have been taught
for centuries that property is something sacred, but they have very few in
common, either legally or philosophically.

Let me quote Thomas Jefferson, who explained it much better than I could
ever do:

# It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors
# have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for
# their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot
# question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature
# at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right
# to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the
# subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an
# acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether
# fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property
# for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the
# occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of
# social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be
# curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain,
# could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If
# nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive
# property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an
# individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but
# the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every
# one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar
# character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other
# possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives
# instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at
# mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread
# from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of
# man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and
# benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible
# over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the
# air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of
# confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature,
# be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits
# arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may
# produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and
# convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
# Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until
# we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave
# a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is
# sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but,
# generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce
# more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that
# the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England
# in new and useful devices.
# 
# Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right,
# but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line
# between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an
# exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board
# for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse
# patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be
# matured.

(Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813)

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Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487ee7da$1@news.povray.org>:
> Which nobody (for the major remaining bugs) has done either <sigh>

Having a community of contributors takes time.

Do you follow the development of other projects?

I would like to take the example of ffmpeg and mplayer, because I follow
their development quite carefully. They get a lot of contributions: there is
a small group of regular contributors who send patches to enhance their
particular area of interest or correct some bugs; sometimes some of these
regulars contributors is offered a write access to the source code. There
are also, from time to time, people who arrive out of the blue and propose a

big thread to make their patch acceptable with regard to the project coding
style. Among these people, there are Google Summer of Code students. And
there are people who occasionally propose small patches for this or that.
There is hardly a day without a small exchange on the mailing-list: "This
patch does foo. / Patch looks ok. / Applied.".


project. Why is it not the case for POV-Ray?

I believe the answer is quite simple: people contribute to ffmpeg or mplayer
because they can see, before even delving in the source code, that
contributions are welcome. And how can they see that? First of all, because
a lot of contributions are accepted every week. That is a snowball effect: a
project starts with a few contributions, and these contributions attract new
contributors. Such effects are very slow on the beginnings, but very
gratifying once they are running.

But for such a snowball effect to happen, the development needs to be open.
Which means at least:

- a public developers mailing-list; that list must be where the actual
  development takes place, or at least a significant part of it;

- access to the current state of the source code; the best way to achieve
  that is to offer read-only anonymous access to a version control system.

I can pretty well guarantee that, as long as POV-Ray does not have these two
items, it will never have an active community of contributors.




benefit financially from it, nothing more.

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Nicolas George wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487ee7da$1@news.povray.org>:
>> Which nobody (for the major remaining bugs) has done either <sigh>
> 
> Having a community of contributors takes time.

ROFL. POV-Ray has been around longer than Linux...

Lets just leave this argument, we will never agree.

	Thorsten

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Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487f22b4@news.povray.org>:
>> Having a community of contributors takes time.
> ROFL. POV-Ray has been around longer than Linux...

With regard to the contributors community, closing the source code for three
years puts the counters back to zero.

> Lets just leave this argument, we will never agree.

Why should we not? Do you not agree that, in order to attract contributors,
you need to make them feel welcome? That is the sole point of my message.

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487e1a40@news.povray.org...
> I would disagree with this, actually - just look at how copyright has
> been extended over the years for everyone in order to protect Mickey
> Mouse (and I'm serious about that one).  In the US, there is "implied
> copyright" which means even if the author doesn't declare a copyright,
> the author's work is covered by copyright law and they have rights to
> their creation.

The Bono act is about copyright (in this case corporate copyright). Again, 
the US tradition is (rather exclusively) about copyright (patrimonial 
rights), not moral rights. It would be interesting to know what kind of 
moral rights have the individual Disney artists on the characters they 
created as Disney employees... While patrimonial rights are attached to the 
work itself, moral rights are attached to the author (or to the author's 
heirs) as a person. These rights are permanent, cannot be revoked and can 
only be transmitted to a third party after the author's death. If I create 
something, my moral rights remain intact whatever rights I grant to somebody 
else.
As Warp says, I "own" my work, not so much as a property (copyright), but as 
an extension of myself and my personality (the French actually use the word 

cannot say "I can do whatever I want with this creation because the rights 
were transferred to me by the author", because one cannot buy the moral 
rights from a living author (or from the author's heirs, see the case of the 
Carmen Jones movie that was forbidden in Europe for several decades). For 
instance, in French law, an author has a "right to repent" and can cancel 
any patrimonial rights that were granted to third parties and remove the 
work from public circulation. In other words, in this tradition, moral 
rights trump patrimonial rights. The goblins in Harry Potter are extreme 
moral rights activists, as they consider that every object they've done is 
theirs forever, no matter who buys it... A case example of the difference 
has been the controversy around film colourisation 
(http://www.caslon.com.au/mrcasesnote2.htm) (this is getting off-topic btw).

G.

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"Gilles Tran" <gil### [at] agroparistechfr> wrote:
> ...(this is getting off-topic btw).

Maybe, but I find your explanation (A) adds dimension to the argument at hand,
and (B) shows a (more) objective voice.  Thanks for sharing this
info, Gilles.

- How

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Nicolas George wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487f22b4@news.povray.org>:
>>> Having a community of contributors takes time.
>> ROFL. POV-Ray has been around longer than Linux...
> 
> With regard to the contributors community, closing the source code for three
> years puts the counters back to zero.

The source code was never closed. POV-Ray is and always was open source.

	Thorsten

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Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487f709d$1@news.povray.org>:
> The source code was never closed. POV-Ray is and always was open source.

For three years, there was a binary without its source code. That is not
open source.

And you did not answer the important question:

Do you not agree that, in order to attract contributors, you need to make
them feel welcome?

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Nicolas George wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487f709d$1@news.povray.org>:
>> The source code was never closed. POV-Ray is and always was open source.
> 
> For three years, there was a binary without its source code. That is not
> open source.

I do not recall the POV-Ray 3.6 source code having vanished from Earth any 
time in the past since its initial release.

> And you did not answer the important question:
> 
> Do you not agree that, in order to attract contributors, you need to make
> them feel welcome?

Yes, I agree that every team member needs to greet all contributors with 
flowers personally.

	Thorsten

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