>>>>> "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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Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487c817d$1@news.povray.org>:
> 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.

What would you have him do instead? It is just not possible to contribute
when the source code is not available.

(And working on anything bigger than a small bugfix on an old version is
useless.)

>						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?

Depends on whether he actually contributes, and the quality of said
contribution.

That is the whole point of Free Software (note the capital: I am not
speaking of "free of charge"): you give the source code (and that does not
costs you anything, if you did not intend to sell your software in the first
place); a lot of people are hugely beneficiary from that situation, but
since it does not costs you anything, that is not a problem; and sometimes
you get interesting contributions, which is so much the better for you.

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Nicolas George wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487c817d$1@news.povray.org>:
>> 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.
> 
> What would you have him do instead? It is just not possible to contribute
> when the source code is not available.

Except that it is available.

<sarcasm> Of course, we have been drowning in a flood of contributions since 
the 3.7 beta source code has been available, so you might have missed the 
original post about its availability.</sarcasm>

 > (And working on anything bigger than a small bugfix on an old version is
 > useless.)

The opposite is true: To make bigger changes, you stick to a fixed working 
copy as you don't want every small change screwing up your large changes. 
Afterwards you merge your code. That is why there are branches and related 
features used when managing large source code repositories.

	Thorsten

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Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487cac23@news.povray.org>:
> Except that it is available.

It is _now_. Alexandre's post was in the past tense.

The source code for the beta release, as far as I can see, has been
available since 2008-02-18, which is somewhat about three years after the
first binaries.

> The opposite is true: To make bigger changes, you stick to a fixed working 
> copy as you don't want every small change screwing up your large changes. 
> Afterwards you merge your code. That is why there are branches and related 
> features used when managing large source code repositories.

Of course, but that does not mean you must base your branch on an old
version when there is a more recent and reasonably stable one.

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On 15-Jul-08 0:48, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:33:34 -0400, Warp wrote:
> 
>> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>>> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:51:59 -0400, Warp wrote:
>>>> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>>>>> Words do have more than a single definition, typically. ;-)
>>>>   Tell that to the FSF.
>>> Well, you're the one saying you don't understand their usage....
>>   I didn't say I don't understand it. I said I completely disagree with
>>   it.
> 
> So you don't think there's any definition of "free" that applies other 
> than "free of cost"?  

No, he thinks free of cost is *one* of the legitimate interpretations of 
free.

> Interesting interpretation of the English language, that....

The interpretation of the English language that is interesting is: 'this 
is not free software because it is free (of cost)'. And the surprise is 
that there are people who speak English and think this is logical. As 
many have said before: the FSF should never have claimed free software 
as a concept. There were a couple of ways out, e.g. 'free software' of 
Free Software, both will notify that a concept is meant that differs 
from the colloquial combination of the words free and software. Even 
better would have been FSF compliant software or similar.
I have a feeling that this is a concept that was influenced in some way 
by the American copyright and patent system. At least if I read the FSF 
definition of 'free software' it feels as if it was written by a group 
of aliens without any knowledge of the Dutch (or any other European) 
copyright and patent system. Which is probably true ;). Perhaps it would 
help if Americans would understand that something they feel passionate 
about (free software, American football, country music) might be 
perceived as just another folklore thing overseas. Don't get me wrong, 
free software (in any of its various meanings) does have a role also in 
Europe, just as there is a place for the Amsterdam Admirals and Ilse 
DeLange, but why the fuss?

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On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:44:05 +0200, andrel wrote:

> On 15-Jul-08 0:48, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:33:34 -0400, Warp wrote:
>> 
>>> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:51:59 -0400, Warp wrote:
>>>>> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>>>>>> Words do have more than a single definition, typically. ;-)
>>>>>   Tell that to the FSF.
>>>> Well, you're the one saying you don't understand their usage....
>>>   I didn't say I don't understand it. I said I completely disagree
>>>   with it.
>> 
>> So you don't think there's any definition of "free" that applies other
>> than "free of cost"?
> 
> No, he thinks free of cost is *one* of the legitimate interpretations of
> free.

Well, "free" is an overloaded term in English.  As I stated elsewhere in 
this (or a similar) discussion, "free" is "gratis" but it *also* is 
"libre".  FSF talks about "Free" in the "Libre" sense, not the "gratis" 
sense.

Jim

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