Warp wrote:
> Woody <nomail@nomail> wrote:
>> I hate to use a cliche but I feel like a taker, rather than a giver when
>> it comes to this great program.
> 
> In my opinion just being a user, contributing to the newsgroups, and maybe
> an image from time to time, is a great contribution. I bet nothing makes
> the pov-team happier than people who use the program, be it for fun, work
> or both.

In my opinion, add one to the list: showing the program to others :) We all
like the free advertising (and word of mouth is the best kind).

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Sabrina Kilian <"ykgp at vtSPAM.edu"> wrote:
> Keep asking questions. Look at it from the perspective of someone just
> finding POV-Ray. They may have the same question but, like so many
> people, feel that they aren't ready to join in the community and start
> asking them. Even simple questions give more experienced users time to
> think about a problem again, and maybe come up with a new idea.

Some day you may even ask "how do I do X?" and a developer will answer "uh,
you can't, but now that I think about it, it would be useful if you could".
And POV4.1 gets the new feature :)

From what I heard in the FLOSS podcast, that's how many features were added
back in POV2.0 days...

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andrel wrote:
> *) the reasons why some people may overreact a little here to your
> question are that 1) it has been asked over and over again yet the
> license file is very clear and 2) people have moved POV out the list of
> free software in some packages because it does not comply to some
> arbitrary definition, thereby suggesting that POV costs money to use.

Doesn't matter if it suggests POV costs money. It's still bad if they put it
in the same bag as nVidia video drivers for Linux (I mean it literally,
some distros put them in the same group, "non-free" or similar).

Both are free in price. But nvidia drivers are closed-source, and POV-Ray
lets you see the code, even modify it, even redistribute your modification.
You just have to comply with the rules for modification and redistribution,
which happen not to match FSF's Free Software definition, or Debian Free
Software Guidelines, or whatever.

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"Jérôme M. Berger" wrote:
> Alessio Sangalli wrote:
> | Now, you just said POV-4 will be GPLv3. Jerome said he thinks it
> won't.
> | Any better place to ask or *read*? Is the code for POV-4 available
> | somewhere to review and help with the effort?
> |
> Well, I thought I remembered a discussion in which it was said that
> POV would not move to GPL, although the precise license wasn't
> determined yet and things may have changed since. However Thorsten
> is supposed to be the official spokesperson for the POV-team so I
> guess his words carry more weight than mine here :)

Last I heard, they were waiting for GPLv3 wording to be officially completed
and released, then analyze it to see if it matched what they wanted.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian <"ykgp at vtSPAM.edu"> wrote:
>> Keep asking questions. Look at it from the perspective of someone just
>> finding POV-Ray. They may have the same question but, like so many
>> people, feel that they aren't ready to join in the community and start
>> asking them. Even simple questions give more experienced users time to
>> think about a problem again, and maybe come up with a new idea.
> 
> Some day you may even ask "how do I do X?" and a developer will answer "uh,
> you can't, but now that I think about it, it would be useful if you could".
> And POV4.1 gets the new feature :)
> 
> From what I heard in the FLOSS podcast, that's how many features were added
> back in POV2.0 days...
> 

Or, before a developer responds, someone else says "This is how you can 
do X." and the developer responds "Wow, that actually works?"

Either way, dialogs get people thinking. Even simple questions can 
create interesting discussions.

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>>>>> "Alexandre" == Alexandre DENIS <Ale### [at] labrifr> writes:

Alexandre> This kind of answer is not likely to attract new developers.

Alexandre> You may agree or not, but nowadays, most free (as in "of no cost")
Alexandre> developers contribute to free (as defined by FSF) projects, or at
Alexandre> least to FSF-friendly projects.

Only if you stay within the echo chamber of the card-carrying FSF members.

Come outside, look around.  The FSF is only a very small part of the "Free"
software movement.  I'd say the FSF is almost an irrelevant minority now.
Free software is mainstream, although most of us just call it Open Source.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<mer### [at] stonehengecom> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion

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Alexandre DENIS <Ale### [at] labrifr> wrote:
> This kind of answer is not likely to attract new developers.
>
> You may agree or not, but nowadays, most free (as in "of no cost")
> developers contribute to free (as defined by FSF) projects, or at least to
> FSF-friendly projects.
>
> I guess POV-Team doesn't need new developers.

I'm not sure you can prove this assertion that most people are put off by
licence issues.

I would guess that the combination of a small number of people who are
interested in the first place (how many renderer programmers are there?), a
complex codebase, and source access issues (e.g. effort in fixing defects in
25b source could well be wasted when the binaries are on beta 27) would limit
the pool of recruits.

Tom

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Nicolas Alvarez  wrote in message <487c1ece@news.povray.org>:
> You just have to comply with the rules for modification and redistribution,
> which happen not to match FSF's Free Software definition, or Debian Free
> Software Guidelines, or whatever.

If you intend to convince people here, you need to put the emphasis on the
"whatever", because a lot of people here are allergic to the FSF.

You may want to emphasize, for example, that the most noise about software
freedom nowadays come from the BSD people, who claim that the GPL is not
Free. Obviously, they are not speaking about charging money.

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Tom York wrote:

> I'm not sure you can prove this assertion that most people are put off by
> licence issues.
> 
> I would guess that the combination of a small number of people who are
> interested in the first place (how many renderer programmers are there?),
> a complex codebase, and source access issues (e.g. effort in fixing
> defects in 25b source could well be wasted when the binaries are on beta
> 27) would limit the pool of recruits.

Being myself a developer involved in some free/opensource/whatever projects
and being knowledgeable in the field of parallel programming, I would have
been interested in playing with POV-Ray some months ago. But the
time-limited beta with no source code, the hostile messages to potential
opensource contributors treated as FSF-ayatollahs, and the "you may develop
a patch if you want, but it is already obsoleted by unreleased code"
attitude let me go away.

I have no proof for my assertion. I am aware that I only speak for myself.
However, the fact is that PVM-POV and the MPI patch are unmaintained, and
the multithreaded version has been beta for years, when others (Indigo,
Kerkythea, Pixie, Yafray,...) are all multithreaded (even without being
GPL).

Specialist in parallel programming would have been a great addition in the
POV-Team, but the current strategy let me believe that external
contributors are not welcome.

-a.

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Alexandre DENIS wrote:
> I would have
> been interested in playing with POV-Ray some months ago. But the
> time-limited beta with no source code, 

And here you show exactly why you are not welcome: You come with the 
attitude that you *might* consider to do something if and only if someone 
else first does something for you. So what you assert is that your 
contribution *could* be worth so much more than a developer who has already 
*proven* his/her contributions' worth, that said developer has to do work 
beforehand, for you to even start working. -- Hmm, is it only me who thinks 
that the only beneficiary using such logic is you, not the project you 
*could* decide to contribute to?

	Thorsten

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