> > Couldn't you just disallow code theft in commercial products? That
> > way, you'd cultivate a greater amount of freeware programs that'd 
> > use POV-Ray's code, which would speed along the development of 
> > such programs.
> >
> The real issue here is that while POV-Ray is open source it is still
> the property of the POV-Team. You may modify the source to make a
> different version of POV-Ray, you may study the source code for your
> own edification, but you may not rip out parts of the source code
> to make your own program work. The source code for POV-Ray is the
> intellectual property of the POV-Team which grants them the liberty
> of imposing any restrictions on it they so choose including
> copyright protection under the law both national and international.

Of course, the POV-Team may do so... but WHY do they do so? Who
benefits from this? 
(Disclaimer: I do not want to annoy the POV-Team, in fact I love your
work very much and I can live very well with the current license. I'm
just thinking of what could be done using POV-Ray code, such as
converters, animators, etc.)
While GPL programs were unusual when POV-Ray was created (outside
Linux at least), and thus it's easy to understand that POV-Ray did not
have this license from the beginning, I think that this would be a
good license for POV-Ray today.
And I think that now is a good time to think about the license again
as the development of POV-Ray seems to have slowened down (the last
version (3.1e) dates from March '99 and the next planned one is a
compilation of some patches).

I hope that I've not made me some enemies now.

  Florian

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