First: I'm so glad people are talking about this. Also, this is a long
message. Sorry.

I myself have tried to license the files I posted here in the newsgroups
with a CC-Attribution or a CC-Attribution-ShareAlike license, because, as
was mentioned above (by Chris?) the CC licenses were the only ones I found
referring to "works" as if they were pieces of art. Also, not being
particularly versed in legalese (nor wanting to spend the time to get
versed), the CC licenses seemed to me the easiest to understand.

Personally, I wouldn't care if somebody sold a poster on Zazzle that
*contained* an object/texture/macro that I included in this library, but if
the scene was *only* that object, or a trivial change of it, or was exactly
a demo scene included with the object, I would be a bit miffed. On the
other hand, I don't think I would be miffed enough to do anything about it,
so if the licence allowed that, I think it would be OK. I'll call this
Unmodified Zazzle-Gank.

I don't think we should use the GPL for this library because it's viral
nature would, I think, discourage more than encourage participation
(although I would like to see it for POV-Ray itself... is that the current
plan for 4.0?). From what I understand (which isn't much) the LGPL would
work fine too. I see SDL as easily definable code and the resulting images
as binary output.

my summary:

GPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
  advantages: good, freedom-style viral license encouraging community
  disadvantages: hard to read, geared toward code (only?), probably would
discourage use by the widest audience, every change must be dated &
attributed for the code to be released again (maybe an advantage?), "The
GPL requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice"

The current POV license doesn't really cover this kind of repository. It's
awfully specific: scenes in /SCENES (except /SCENES/INCDEMO) are under
complete control of the author unless explicitly noted otherwise.

LGPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
  advantages: good, freedom-style license encouraging community
  disadvantages: hard to read, applies to code (only?), may(?) permit
Unmodified Zazzle-Gank

CC-Attribution http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
  advantages: readable, applies to "works" rather than referencing code
  disadvantages: *requires* attribution IF the author says so (which may
discourage wide use)

CC-Attribution-SA http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
  advantages: readable, applies to "works" rather than just code, encourages
community
  disadvantages: *requires* attribution as above, requires derivative works
to be released under same license(like GPL).

There used to be a CC license (I think SA 1.0?) which didn't require
attribution, but I can't find it now. I think it's deprecated.

BSD http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
  advantages: simple, short, permissive
  disadvantages: requires copyright notice, may allow Unmodified Zazzle-Gank

Public Domain
  advantages: most permissive of all
  disadvantages: probably doesn't apply worldwide, almost certainly allows
Unmodified Zazzle-Gank

There's a crapload of other licenses at
http://www.opensource.org/site_index.php

Since I'm pretty fuzzy about all this, please feel free to correct me.
Looking at all this legal crap makes my brain cringe. Personally I would
favor a CC-Attribution license. It's permissive, and the only disadvantage
is the requirement for credit if the author so wishes, which I think is
pretty easy. Most of the other licenses require some kind of credit anyway.

I don't think we ought to write a new license just for this, but IANAL.

-Stefan

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