Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487dbf58$1@news.povray.org>:
> And how many contributions have there been in the past five months?

Interesting contributions are rare, you can not do statistics with so few
data. But they are even rarer when the development model is closed.

I could argue that all potential contributors have been disgusted by the
three years of closed-sourceness and moved on to other projects. Alexandre,
for example.

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news: 487dc16f$1@news.povray.org...

> You are right. But as shown in the quoted text, the moral rights do not
> allow to restrict the diffusion of the work.

Then it's part of Article 9 "Right of reproduction"

(1) Authors of literary and artistic works protected by this Convention 
shall have the exclusive right of authorizing the reproduction of these 
works, in any manner or form.

Since the Berne convention is about literary and artistic work, it may not 
apply to software, but this is just to point out that the concept of the 
author (rather than the owner of rights) being the ultimate authority is 
well established.

G.

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"Gilles Tran"  wrote in message <487dd848@news.povray.org>:
> Then it's part of Article 9 "Right of reproduction"

Which are patrimonial rights and not moral rights.

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> And how many contributions have there been in the past five months? - Ah,
> yes, thousands and I missed them all :-(
> 
> So I can show that there have been no major contributions in five months,
> and you can show nothing about the past three years. My argument is based
> on facts, your argument is pure speculation. - Hmm, I guess I have the
> better argument after all. And believe me, I would be quite a bit happier
> if I didn't have such a strong argument...

Maybe the POV-Team policy made the potential contributors go away.
Open-source developers are not manpower that you can rent for free when you
want. People have to feel implicated in the project, and may sometime be
playing with the code for months or years before doing any usefull
contribution. When the code is sometime available, sometime not, when
people are rough if you ask why POV-Ray is not GPL, then potential
contributors can't feel implicated and will go away. Usually, when I need a
feature in free software I am using, I implement it myself. It was not
possible with POV-Ray since source code was not available at the time I
needed it (in 2006-2007).

Why didn't I do it since the beta code release? Because it was too long for
me and I switched to Kerkythea (which is not precisely "open", but fits my
needs) in the meantime, after having used POV-ray for 8 years.

I am not complaining at all and am quite happy with this situation now. I
just wanted to underline that when the POV-Team repeats "3.7 will be ready
when it will be ready" because of a lack of manpower, well, they know why.

-a.

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On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:24:44 +0200, Gilles Tran wrote:

> This is the traditional US point of view but other cultures have a
> different one, where the author is actually "sacred" : it's called
> "moral rights" and it's part of the Berne Convention (Article 6b)

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.

Jim

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On 16-Jul-08 10:22, Nicolas George wrote:
> andrel  wrote in message <487### [at] hotmailcom>:
>> I don't know about you but when I help my neighbor I don't usually ask 
>> money for it.
> 
> Depends on what your job is.
> 
>> 		Indeed this precisely the tricky bit you left out. You are 
>> not restricted in your freedom to redistribute copies, provided you are 
>> not charging for it.
> 
> And a prisoner is not restricted in his freedom to go wherever he wants,
> provided he is not leaving his cell.
> 
> "Provided" is exactly a restriction.
yes I think I was aware of that. The point is that it does not restrict 
the number nor in who can receive or give it. So the restriction is only 
financially and not in principle. For me that is the most important part 
of the freedom, you are of course free to feel any other way.
BTW not relevant to this discussion perhaps but no license will give you 
total freedom. Even 'free software' does often (always?) not allow to be 
sold in a closed form in a way that suggests that the seller developed 
it himself. That too is a restriction. In that way every license has its 
own restrictions, apparently some are deemed more important than others, 
but which ones is a matter of taste and cultural background, I think. 
Perhaps the only way to make it absolutely free is if you publish it 
anonymous on a public server with a note that everything is allowed, 
even hiding it in closed commercial code without attribution. Although 
this license is not legally valid in most countries you may get away 
with it.

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andrel  wrote in message <487### [at] hotmailcom>:
> yes I think I was aware of that. The point is that it does not restrict 
> the number nor in who can receive or give it.

That point is not true, unfortunately: no commercial usage means that people
without broadband Internet access can not order a CD with the software on
it, nor find it on a CD accompanying a magazine or a book.

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On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:38:00 -0400, Nicolas George wrote:

> That point is not true, unfortunately: no commercial usage means that
> people without broadband Internet access can not order a CD with the
> software on it, nor find it on a CD accompanying a magazine or a book.

Unless the publisher explicitly grants permission for that type of 
distribution as a one-off.  I believe that's been done with POVRay in the 
past.

Jim

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Jim Henderson  wrote in message <487e354f$1@news.povray.org>:
> Unless the publisher explicitly grants permission for that type of 
> distribution as a one-off.

That makes a lot of exceptions to avoid the drawbacks of something, while
its usefulness remains to be proven.

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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> And how many contributions have there been in the past five months? - Ah,
> yes, thousands and I missed them all :-(
>
> So I can show that there have been no major contributions in five months,
> and you can show nothing about the past three years. My argument is based on
> facts, your argument is pure speculation. - Hmm, I guess I have the better
> argument after all. And believe me, I would be quite a bit happier if I
> didn't have such a strong argument...

The beta source page recommends focussing on defect fixing rather than major
submissions, as far as I remember.

Tom

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