"Reuben Pearse" <reu### [at] pearsecouk> wrote in message 
news:47B### [at] pearsecouk...
> Hi,
>
> There are some pencils and a pen pot on the Povobjects site. See the link 
> below:
>
> http://objects.povworld.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?X=pencil
>
> Does lib.povray.org now have all the objects that are on the povobjects 
> site? Or is it a case of contacting the original authors and getting them 
> to re-submit their objects so that they're covered under LGPL?
>

Harvesting object from any sites with a more restrictive licenses (or where 
no license is given, in which case copyright remains with the original 
author) would need consent from the original author. This would either mean 
that the original author would need to re-submit to lib.povray.org so that 
their objects can be distributed under the CC-LGPL, or, it's also possible 
for someone else to do the actual submission with appropriate consent from 
the author.

It's possible that some existing objects from other locations have licenses 
that permit re-distribution under the CC-LGPL without requiring additional 
consent from the original author, in which case, anyone willing to put in a 
little time could do it.

> It would be great to see a browseable objects package included as part of 
> the standard POV install.
>

I'd very much like to see that too. The motivation behind the creation of 
this object collection (http://lib.povray.org/) was to build a set of 
objects that can be used together,  under a common license that enables (and 
indeed encourages) future modification and redistribution. The basic naming 
standards that we've adopted are intended to enable the objects to be added 
into a single directory and used individually or in combination without 
conflicting with one another.

Chris Cason has announced the intention to move POV-Ray V4 over to the GPL 
license. There's nothing stopping us (or anyone else for that matter) 
creating a download of the whole object collection right now. It should 
therefore be possible in the future to distribute POV-Ray V4, along with the 
entire object collection as well as open source modellers, sets of utilities 
and other supporting software as a bundle. Indeed, I think it was suggested 
that it could even be built into open source operating system distribution 
packages.

The first step of course will be to build the object collection up to a 
critical mass.  We need to get enough interesting objects to make it the 
place of reference when people are looking for POV-Ray objects or when 
they're looking for a place to share their own objects.

There are lots of ways of contributing to this effort. It would be great if 
someone would be willing to reach out to contributors to other collections 
and invest a little time to build this collection in that way. I can imagine 
that many of the original authors would be very pleased to see their work 
take on a new life.

Regards,
Chris B.

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