Let me begin by telling this is a very good follow up on the previous
discussion. :)

"Chris B" <c_b### [at] btconnectcomnospam> wrote:
> I think that licensing is the thing that needs most discussion. One option
> is for each person to define their own license and include information
> within their submission about the terms of their license.

I believe this would be too cumbersome and eligible to many legal nitpicks.

> I would rather see a standard license that would cover this entire
> collection

me too!

> and I think the main candidates are:
>   o  The POV-Ray license

the problem with this one is:  wouldn't we fall into the same problem we
have with povray license today, where people who previously contributed
code to povray itself are unreacheable and thus the license has to remain
the same until the planned 4.0 rewrite?  I mean, if i submit a povray scene
which comes included with povray and is licensed under the current povray
license, will it be able to be included in next povray releases in case of
license change that reveals itself conflicting with the previous license?
Unless we explicitely stated that the scenes are licensed under current or
future povray licenses.

>   o  A Creative Commons License (see
> http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses)
>   o  Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication
> (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/)

This could be nice, specially since they're stabilished liberal licenses
that exist well outside of povray's realm.  I would also put the GPL or BSD
licenses under consideration.  The BSD is the classical liberal license,
allowing the code to be used for any purposes, by anyone.  The GPL is the
one conclaiming people modifying GPLed code to also distribute the
modifications IF redistributing the modified binary.  In the case of povray
scenes, i guess if people modify a pov scene and distribute the modified
generated jpg or png, they should also distribute the modifications to the
source scene file.  I don't know how compatible the GPL is to the povray
distribution so that eventual GPLed include files could be distributed with
it.

>   o  A custom license covering this collection

i'm really against Yet Another License For The Sake of It...

> My view is that having an area on povray.org where all of the contributions
> can be re-used without any preconditions (or with a very minimal agreed
> standard set) would be good for POV-Ray and would make an important
> differentiator for this collection over other object and include file sites.
> This would also mean that the POV-Ray community could freely enhance these
> contributions over the years without having to get permission from previous
> contributors who may now be uncontactable.

In other worlds, kind of the typical open-source project source repository.
This sounds really nice.  And should sound nice to povray maintainers as
well, since code contributions for povray includes eventually getting into
the distribution itself would be maintained by the community themselves. :)

> The downside is that it may
> discourage some contributors from submitting their work.

I don't believe it would discourage people any more than today when no such
provision exists and it would even clarify legal issues so everyone would
benefit.

Post a reply to this message