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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Nicolas George wrote:

|> 	Well, AFAIK that particular aspect of the GPL has never been tested
|> in court.
|
| That is true, but that should not prevent people from reading the
law, and
| trying to understand it.
|
|> 	    But this is precisely what the GPL forbids. In particular,
|> if I take a GPL DLL and if I write a program that uses this DLL,
|> even if my program does not contain any outside code itself, I must
|> release it under the GPL
|
| ... and as far as I understand the law, there is absolutely no
case for the
| source code of the program in this situation. For the binary, on
the other
| hand, even shared libraries come with declaratives headers, which
are under
| GPL too.
|
	They are under GPL, but they are not part of the binary. It is
often possible to compile a program using a library without
including the headers in the source (OK, it's bad practice, but it
is possible).

| The argument of the FSF lawyers here is that the program needs the GPL
| library, it does not work without it. But the whole principle of the
| copyright laws is to consider software as a work of art. There is
no need
| for a work of art to work.

	So? My point is that I am *not* free to write a program using that
DLL and distribute my program any way I want. Therefore, the GPL is
not free.

		Jerome
- --
+------------------------- Jerome M. BERGER ---------------------+
|    mailto:jeb### [at] freefr      | ICQ:    238062172            |
|    http://jeberger.free.fr/     | Jabber: jeb### [at] jabberfr   |
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Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487f760c$1@news.povray.org>:
> I do not recall the POV-Ray 3.6 source code having vanished from Earth any 
> time in the past since its initial release.

The 3.7 source code, on the other hand, was not there. You know it
perfectly, as you know that this is what I am talking about.

>> 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.

That is not what I am talking about.

If you happen to be wondering why there are so little contributions to
POV-Ray, just look in a mirror: that is precisely your attitude that makes
them go away.

Please note that I am not accusing you: you have a total right not to want
contributors. But in that case, be coherent: do not pretend you want them,
and do not pretend your project is open.

If, on the other hand, you actually want contributors, then you should as
soon as possible set up a public developers mailing-list and current source
code repository. And then be patient, as you have quite a lot of bad
reputation that needs to be forgotten.

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> 	They are under GPL, but they are not part of the binary. It is
> often possible to compile a program using a library without
> including the headers in the source

If you manage it, and if you did not copy the headers either of course, then
there is absolutely no legal way the GPL could cause any constraint to your
program.

Post a reply to this message

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Nicolas George wrote:
| 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.
|
	Actually, it used to have a reasonably active community of
contributors (just before 3.5 was released). They didn't contribute
directly to the core, but instead they contributed to MegaPov. That
worked because (here we find your two points):
~ - Most discussion took place openly on the newsgroups here;
~ - Nathan Kopp (who maintained MegaPov at the time) released new
versions very frequently (including the source).

	When 3.5 came out, all this activity petered out. Among the
possible reasons are:
~ - Nathan got included in the core team and had less time to keep
releasing MegaPov on the same rythm;
~ - The 3.5 code was quite different from the 3.1 code (on which
MegaPov and all community development were based and which was
pretty old at the time). When 3.5 came out, it required a
significant investment to port the patches to the new code base and
most contributors didn't want to spend that time re-doing something
they had already done just to have to do it again when the next
version came out (which is one reason why I never ported my
contributions to the new code base and simply moved to other projects).

	Moreover, one of the reason why there was that much community
development at the time despite POV's closed development model may
be that there were no other open source renderers available then.
Now, potential contributors come to POV, see that there is no recent
source code activity and simply move to other more visibly active
projects (unless they try to come here first and get put off by the
oh-so-tactful official response they get).

		Jerome
- --
+------------------------- Jerome M. BERGER ---------------------+
|    mailto:jeb### [at] freefr      | ICQ:    238062172            |
|    http://jeberger.free.fr/     | Jabber: jeb### [at] jabberfr   |
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Nicolas George wrote:

|> 	They are under GPL, but they are not part of the binary. It is
|> often possible to compile a program using a library without
|> including the headers in the source
|
| If you manage it, and if you did not copy the headers either of
course, then
| there is absolutely no legal way the GPL could cause any
constraint to your
| program.

	According to the text of the license, it does. How legal that may
or may not be will probably depend on your country, but the fact
remains that the intent of the FSF was to put those restrictions in
(that is the main difference between the GPL and LGPL: the LGPL
allows dynamic linking without restrictions and static linking with
some restrictions, the GPL doesn't allow any linking unless the
program is GPL).

		Jerome
- --
+------------------------- Jerome M. BERGER ---------------------+
|    mailto:jeb### [at] freefr      | ICQ:    238062172            |
|    http://jeberger.free.fr/     | Jabber: jeb### [at] jabberfr   |
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