Hi all,

Currently POV-Ray is copyright by Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd. and
the code is licensed under the AGPLv3+, the docs are CC-BY-NC-SA-2.5 and the SDL
includes, macros and sample scenes etc are CC-BY-SA-3.0. POV-Ray Ltd owns the
trademarks 'POV-Ray', 'Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer', and 'POV-Team'. As far
as I can tell there are no patent concerns.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I have some questions about that situation:

Will copyright assignment to POV-Ray Ltd be required for contributing to
POV-Ray?

Are there any other requirements for contributions to the new AGPLv3 POV-Ray?

Is there a contributor agreement? Is there any guarantee that code contributions
will remain under the AGPLv3+ or other FLOSS licenses?

What is the business model and structure of POV-Ray Ltd?

Is POV-Ray Ltd a registered non-profit? Can we donate towards server,
development and other costs?

What are POV-Ray Ltd plans for license enforcement?

What is the reason for the documentation being under a non-commercial-only
license? Is there any chance of adopting CC-BY-SA-3.0 for the documentation?

The CC-BY-SA-3.0 license requires that all derivative works are licensed under
the same license. As far as I can tell this means that all scenes rendered with
POV-Ray that use the SDL includes, macros or are derived from the sample scenes
must be CC-BY-SA-3.0. I expect this would be problematic for some users of
POV-Ray who might want to use different licenses for their scenes. The CC0
license might be more appropriate since it is intended to be equivalent to
public domain where possible and extremely permissive where not possible. Is
there any chance of adopting CC0 for the SDL includes, macros and sample scenes?

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Is there a trademark policy? Either way I would like to suggest adopting
something like the Debian trademark policy, which aims for maximum use by the
community while protecting the community from misuse of the trademarks.

http://www.debian.org/trademark

While there are probably no patent concerns, I would like to point out Debian's
patent policy and patent FAQ.

http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq
http://www.debian.org/legal/patent

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