In article <37D02AE6.8A215053@interlog.com> , Dennis Clarke 
<dcl### [at] interlogcom>  wrote:
> Ken wrote:
>
>> The official status means the Pov team is dedicated to resolving bugs and
>> it becomes a customer service issue.
>
> I didn't realize that there were customers.  If so, is there a public stock
> offering?
>
> I've never paid a cent for POV-Ray but I've spent a lot of my valuable hours
> with it.  I am certainly considering buying the two IRTC cdroms just for the
> sake of paying for the joy of using POV-Ray.  I'd rather that there was a
price
> of $29.95 on the POV-Ray product itself as well as an activation key or
license
> number.  There would be no problem with the POV-Ray team buying the hardware
> that they need and you would have a viable company.

Here is something from the POV-Ray MacOS Read Me coming with the official
POV-Ray Mac version. Eduard Schwan wrote it a long, long time ago (I am
posting it here as Eduard doesn't read these newsgroups regularly as far as
I know). I think what it says is still valid, perhaps even more:

>>>

Why does the team do this for free?

Here's a letter I sent somebody long ago to explain the mission of the team:

"Thank you very much for your interest in compensating us team members
somehow, and I personally  appreciate your excitement and enthusiasm, as do
the other team members, and in fact, that's mostly  what we live for!  But
as far as any kind of compensation goes, it turns out to be a really
difficult thing to  deal with *fairly*.  First, we are spread all over the
world, USA, Germany, Holland, Australia, Denmark, etc...  Second of all,
different team members have been on "the team" for different lengths of
time and contributed different amounts of work.  I for example, have been on
the team for several years,  but only contributed a couple of things to the
main cross-platform POV-Ray engine (most notably the  Mosaic Preview.)  I am
the Mac OS team member, and have lately been single-handedly building the
Mac OS front-end for POV-Ray.  Third, this is being run as a cooperative
distributed hobby, not a for- profit business.  So let's say we pour a bunch
of money into a pot somewhere, who gets what  percentage? Do I get the same
percentage as Chris Young who has put more work into the project in the
past few months than I have in the past few years?  Do we all get free
Microsoft Windows compilers,  useless to me and the Unix guys. Mostly what
happens is our nice team comeraderie turns into a bitter  feud for divvying
up the spoils (BTW, this is spoken from direct team experience from long
ago.)  So  instead, each of us uses the ray tracer to make friends, show
off, create cool movies, write and sell  books and CD-ROMs, etc.  Since the
team treats this as a spare time fun activity, the joy we get comes  from
lots of people doing great things with POV-Ray, simple as that.  This also
explains why it takes  some time for us to come out with new versions... we
are working on it in what little time there is  between career and family.
Hopefully this helps explain some of the problems involved in getting money
for a team hobby.  Also,  please note that this is my personal set of
opinions and observations as a POV-Ray Team member, but I  do not speak for
any other team members or the team as a whole.  Other team members may feel
differently, and that is part of what makes this such a wonderful group of
people to work with! Happy Ray Tracing, and go show POV-Ray to your friends
and coworkers! Eduard Schwan -- POV- Ray Team Mac Dude"

<<<

Note: This statement is a private one from Eduard. I completely agree with
it. However, neither Eduard or I do speak for the POV-Team, opinions
expressed are our own ones, only!


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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