On Thu, 27 May 1999 14:33:30 +1000, Edward C. wrote:
>I think it would be of great benefit to tweakers and patch-writers if the
>official distribution was maintained on GCC, thus easily compilable on most
>GCC systems, present and future.  This would be beneficial because GCC is
>free, and almost universal across all platforms.  

Agreed, though there's nothing keeping you from building POV on GCC now,
other than the lack of a makefile on some platforms.  I'm sure they'd
include one if you sent it to them.

>Also, while the POV-Team may feel that they need more control of their
>software than the GPL allows, I strongly believe that their POV-Legal
>document is too restrictive.  An enormous amount of excellent software is
>distributed and used under the GPL very successfully.

I don't see too many differences between POVLEGAL and GPL, other than 
the requirement that anything built with POV code be a version of POV,
the distribution limitations, and the blacklist at the end of it.  

Chris Young had something to say about the whole POVLEGAL thing in his
famous "Plans for 1999" post:

  We've made solemn promises to our developers over the years that we will 
  protect their donated contributions to our freeware from being commercially
  exploited.  Our tough language in POVLEGAL.DOC and our refusal to expand 
  POV-Ray's linkability is our best effort to keep that promise.

It seems to me that the GPL was also designed to prevent commercial
exploitation, so it seems like GPL and POV are a perfect match.

>Lastly, there is Panorama, the GNU raytracer.  Panorama is still in
>relatively early development, but the project seems to be going in the same
>direction as POV - a free and extremely versatile raytracer.  It does not
>make sense to me that these two projects run in parallel when the efforts of
>both teams could be combined.

I agree, to a point.  Panorama is a much more ambitious project than POV
is or has been.  It's also being run under the auspices of the FSF, as I
understand it, so getting your contributions accepted will be even harder
with Panorama than it is now with POV due to the paperwork FSF makes you
sign.  I'd rather stick with the more informal "mail it to us and if we
like it we'll put it in" model.

It's worth noting, though, that if POV were GPL, you could reuse code from
POV in Panorama and vice-versa, so the amount of duplicated work probably
still wouldn't be too high.

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