> No one wants to see others make money on their work without sharing
> in those profits.

But putting a program under the GPL doesn't mean giving away all the
rights. For example, the GPL forbids usage of the code in other
non-GPL (e.g. profit-making) programs, so there's no danger!

If the POV-Team cannot decide to allow the usage of ALL POV-Ray
source-code, they could still release a library containing the parser.
That would, at least, allow creation of animators and converters
reading POV files and thus make the POV file format and probably also
the renderer even more popular.

But the main advantage is a different one: Have you seen any other
program of which at least 10 different, patched versions exist?
(perhaps except PGP!)
All the efforts to create the patched versions (done by independent
programmers) could be merged with the POV-Team's to develop the main
version instead. Not only that we'd probably have POV-Ray 4 by now,
but also a lot of confusion, incompatibilities and bugs between the
patched versions could be avoided.

> Lutz, sorry for the off topic discussion.

You're right, this probably belongs into povray.general, but I think
there is not much more to say now, so it's unnecessary moving it.

Florian

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