"Gilles Tran" <gil### [at] agroparistechfr> wrote in message 
news:470b69d6@news.povray.org...

> news: 470b46cb$1@news.povray.org...
>> Welcome to the povray.object-collection newsgroup. This newsgroup has 
>> been set up to support discussions about the POV-Ray Object Collection 
>> web site which is now live at http://lib.povray.org. The web site stores 
>> POV-Ray and Moray objects contributed by the community under the Creative 
>> Commons LGPL license to allow royalty free use, modification and 
>> redistribution.
>
> Is the LGPL the only license accepted? All that I have is already under CC 
> By Attribution (which I find more suitable for artwork), and, in one case, 
> under public domain.
>
> G.

Hi Gilles,

All work contributed to this collection will be distributed under a single 
consistent license which, at present, is the CC-LGPL (which does not mandate 
attribution). This is intended to ease the burden on people using works from 
the collection. If someone uses a number of objects from the collection in a 
scene it means they won't have to keep track of all the different licenses 
or the chain of authors who may have enhanced each object through the years.

Anyone contributing to the collection needs to confirm on the submissions 
form that they're ok with this license and with any future licenses that the 
collection could be distributed under. This is because, as licenses 
continuously evolve, it may be necessary to select a new one for the 
collection in the future and it can be difficult or impossible to track down 
authors and request their consent to a licensing change once a few years 
have passed.

Licensing provoked quite a bit of discussion when ideas for this collection 
were first mooted about a year ago and attibution was one of the difficult 
topics. Clearly the decision to go with the CC-LGPL may deter some people 
from contributing because someone could use their work without giving them 
any credit for it at all (although POV-Ray users are generally quite polite 
in my experience).  However, I hope there will be enough contributions to 
make this work. One argument from the discussion last year was that this 
collection should be for objects, textures, etc rather than highly finished 
downloadable scenes, so I'm hoping that reuse without attribution might be 
less problematic.

Although I'm not a legal expert I believe that work can be distributed by 
the owner under multiple licenses and conditions. I believe that anything 
you've done that is already in the public domain could also be distributed 
under the CC-LGPL. The site allows you to incorporate comments or 
documentation alongside the contribution in which you can clarify that it's 
in the public domain or that it's also available under other licenses. If 
there are elements of your work currently licensed under CC-Attribution that 
you wished to also make available on this site under CC-LGPL,  then I think 
you can do so (and they'd certainly be very much appreciated :o)).

Regards,
Chris B.

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