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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.

Post a reply to this message

> 	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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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> Tom York wrote:
> Which nobody (for the major remaining bugs) has done either <sigh>
>
>  Thorsten

It's difficult to tell what's being actively worked on and what isn't. I admit
I've so far suggested a solution for only one defect, and that was fixed
independently by the POV-team anyway, so investigating it was a bit of a waste
of time on my part.

Additionally, some of the known issues require executive decisions - for
example, the preferred behaviour for media and transparency.

Tom

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> Alexandre DENIS wrote:
>>  It was not
>> possible with POV-Ray since source code was not available at the time I
>> needed it (in 2006-2007).
> 
> Nonsense! The 3.6 final release source code has been available all long.

I mean: up-to-date code (3.7). It is useless to work on outdated code to
develop a patch that couldn't be applied to the latest code.

-a.

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On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:16:18 -0400, Nicolas George wrote:

> Jim Henderson  wrote in message <487e7d38@news.povray.org>:
>> Shareware authors get their software included in magazines and such
>> fairly regularly - all that has to happen is the publisher asks
>> permission (or the author asks the publisher to include it on a
>> compilation disc).
> 
> Ok. But the point of libre software is not the freedom of the original
> author, it is the freedom of other people.

I disagree.  If an author wants to limit distribution of their software, 
that's *absolutely* their right.

> Author of shareware control the diffusion of their works, that implies
> they limit this diffusion. That is, of course, necessary if they want to
> benefit from it. But the raw result is that the software is less
> available than it could be.

And that's the author's choice = my point.

Jim

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Thanks for this info, Gilles - I'm going to have to read it again 
tomorrow or this weekend (when I'm more awake).

I do think that the copyright laws in the US are a bit draconian at 
times, though - and I do think that Disney is a bit of an extreme case 
(yet it is what's most often cited for extending copyright terms here in 
the US).

Jim

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Nicolas George wrote:
> 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.

I've just started reading this thread.

I apologise if Thorsten comes across somewhat strongly as a team member.
That's just his personality ;>

As for your comments and those of others, I'm in the process of reading and
will respond shortly.

-- Chris Cason
   POV Team co-ordinator

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