whoa!  thanks for commenting, Sabrina.  good to see women using povray as
well.  Specially as intelligent and skillful as you seem to be. :)

Sabrina Kilian <ykg### [at] vtedu> wrote:
> For clarity, I think of includes as collections of single
> objects, textures, macros, lighting patterns, just about anything made
> mostly of #declares and meant to be reused. Scenes would be the
> individual artistic expression, possibly made up of items from the
> include. Clear as mud, and probably open to legal nit-picking.

That's a very good definition, i believe everyone will agree.

> I don't know where to look to see what the terms of donating a scene are.

I think that's what we're trying to accomplish here.

> Either the new includes would have to be added to the normal package in the
> proper folders, or the POV-Ray license would have to be changed /
> rewritten to account for the packaged includes being distributed outside
> of the normal package.

AFAIK, povray license is likely to change in coming versions, am i right?  I
heard they're seeking to put it into an OSI-compliant license.

Anyway, i don't think this reworked include collection would go into the
standard include folder as the legal terms stand today.

> Is hosting a jpg of a GPL scene distributing?

I think if users are able to download and save an image to their PCs, it's
like software they can download and use.  OTOH, has you ever seen a GPLed
web site or web service?  I mean, yes, we can see the *generated* html
content, but not the actual PHP sources or something like that...

> Is
> printing a hard copy of a scene, which is a derivative of a binary
> representation, distributing if it is given to someone else?

I realize it was better in the good ol' days.  Too much legal obfuscation
these days...  I wish povray scenes could be licensed under a poetic
license or artistic license, like perl... ;)

> I'd be more partial to an LGPL style license for any includes, over the
> normal GPL, for reasons like the following. If someone creates a scene
> using one of the proposed new includes, which could be anything from
> vector transforms to colors to anything else, when would they need to
> provide access to the source of the scene? If they hosted it online, or
> ran off a hard copy that they sold, or had Zazzle sell copies of it? If
> the scene is theirs, why would the include need to affect the license of
> the final scene?

Very good point, much more well reasoned than mine (i was busy at work and
didn't give too much thought to details).

Indeed, the LGPL is much more well suited for library components.  And it
still retains the GPL benefit of people changing the LGPLed work itself to
contribute back the changes.  Note this doesn't affect people merely using
such works in a scene, they can indeed hide the sources without problems.
And if their scene use a slightly modified LGPLed work, the only
requirement is to publish the modifications to the GPLed work, not to the
whole scene!

> For scenes I think I would prefer stricter terms. I know I would be
> annoyed to see my scenes turn up in someone else's Zazzle store unmodified.

fair enough.

> Having a defined set of rules and requirements might encourage people to
> reuse some code instead of reinventing it. As it stands right now, I
> hesitate to go through the posted scene files looking for things similer
> to anything I am working on. Since only a few that I've seen have
> licenses in them, I would believe that all the rest are not licensable
> and I wouldn't want to accidentally reuse some little trick or function
> I happened to read. While I don't think most people here would fuss over
> a simple texture on one rock in a scene, someone might and it's just
> easier to reinvent everything.

well, if you ever need a potato texture or detailed brick wall texture and
happens to find some of my old scenes, feel free to use them!  When such
collection area is up on povray.org, i'll republish with the chosen proper
license... :)

> And if the rules allow or require changes to get put back into the
> repository, then we might even end up with better results since things
> could be built up instead of reinvented.

Yes, but i've realized many people here are highly creative artistic minded
people who indeed enjoy creating things from scratch.  Still, might be
useful for other people interested in composition rather than creation.

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