> > 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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Florian Fischer wrote:

> Of course, the POV-Team may do so... but WHY do they do so? Who
> benefits from this?

I think part of this stems from the very nature of how POV-Ray started
and how it is currently developed. The POV-Team produces POV-Ray for
free and they do it for FUN. If they allow others to use their code
in other applications those people could easily charge for and make
a profit on the sales of those applications.

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

 But here is where it really gets tricky. The POV-Team members are
scattered all over the world and distrubuting profits made on their
work creates all kinds of monetary distribution problems not to
mention the legal problems involved with any money making operation
of an international nature.
 They don't want to have to form a corporation to continue distibuting
POV-Ray as it has been in the past nor do they want others profiting
on the work they put into the program. Likewise you mentioned that
POV-Ray is comprised of some user submitted patches. This is great for
the purposes of adding features to the program but when money is
invloved how do you decide who gets a what cut of the money pie ?

I am not saying your opinions are wrong but you might consider that
the POV-Team has very valid concerns about their program and how it
is used which is reflected in their current licensing agreement.


Hope for the future -

 One thing you might find encouraging is that I am strongly lobbying
the POV-Team to add a method to internally tessellate POV-Ray primitives
in some future version of the program. If this feature were added it
would greatly simplify the process of adding export capabilities to
the program. So far I have not received any opposition to the principal
of the idea but likewise I have not heard that it is being seriously
considered either. We will have to wait and see.


Lutz, sorry for the off topic discussion.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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Florian Fischer wrote:

>

<snip>

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

Actually, Florian, I hear they chase down anyone who makes suggestions,
and force them to watch an animation of a shiny sphere(maybe even
refractive?) flying over a checkerboard<G>(I'm kidding!). No seriously, I
think Florian makes an interesting point. You could, for example, have a
license that forbids use in commercial programs, but allows use in
non-commercial programs. In this case, it would probably be advantageous
to the POV-Ray community as a whole to allow the use of the code, because
there is very little that you can do with POV-Ray's source code that
wouldn't have to do with 3D graphics. In that case, you could use the
POV-Code to make things like DSO's for BMRT, or converter programs, etc.
While I'm not sure this is exactly GPL(I've been reading it for the last
twenty minutes, and I don't think I can get more than two articles of
legal-ese through my head at once) is, the POV-Team could create their own
license with such provisions. But hey, thats up to POV-Team. This
discussion should probably be on a POV license NG, huh? Oops.

>
>
>   Florian

--
You Know You've Been Raytracing Too Long When:
 You think it took him six days because he was using Win95
Produced by Alex Magidow's Sig File Randomizer(YKYBRTTL jokes courtesy of
c.g.r.raytracing)

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> 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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Florian Fischer wrote:

> 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.

Where have you been ? POV-Ray v3.5 due to be released publicaly sometime
this year will be based almost exclusively on user submitted patches.
POV-Ray v4.0 will be a complete re-write in C++ plus will likely add
even more new features to the program.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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Hi Ken, you recently wrote in moray.win:

> Lutz, sorry for the off topic discussion.
It's not really that off-topic<g>. 

I have also thought about this and I've always wished that the POV-Ray
parser would be excluded from that specific part of the license, since
the parser is not something that people could make a profit with in a
way that goes against the work of the POV-Team or the spirit of
POV-Ray. It *would* help POV gain more support in other programs,
especially converters, though. 
And the parser is not rocket-science, it's just a whole lot of work to
implement. 

I've never felt strongly enough about it to bring it up in the
POV-Team, though<g>. I always thought there were more important
features to implement (in Moray, that is).

- Lutz
  email : lut### [at] stmuccom
  Web   : http://www.stmuc.com/moray

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Hi Ian Burgmyer, you recently wrote in moray.win:

> What if full plug-in support was added to POV-Ray?  Then something like this
> would probably be possible.
I don't think that's going to happen since we want to keep POV-Ray
cross-platform, especially the scene files. And not all platforms
support shared libraries (called DLLs in Windows).

- Lutz
  email : lut### [at] stmuccom
  Web   : http://www.stmuc.com/moray

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Lutz Kretzschmar <lut### [at] stmuccom> wrote in message
news:38d### [at] newsstmuccom...
> Hi Ian Burgmyer, you recently wrote in moray.win:
>
> > What if full plug-in support was added to POV-Ray?  Then something like
this
> > would probably be possible.
> I don't think that's going to happen since we want to keep POV-Ray
> cross-platform, especially the scene files. And not all platforms
> support shared libraries (called DLLs in Windows).

Yeah, I realize that, but what about OS-specific plugins, like file
exporting?

Unless there'd be too much work involved in writing the plugin code (you'd
know about that ;-).  Then again, they'd probably have to write different
code for every OS. . .ahh, screw it :)

--
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-=< Ian (the### [at] hotmailcom >=-

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Lutz Kretzschmar <lut### [at] stmuccom> wrote in article
<38d### [at] newsstmuccom>...



> > What if full plug-in support was added to POV-Ray?  Then something like
this
> > would probably be possible.
> I don't think that's going to happen since we want to keep POV-Ray
> cross-platform, especially the scene files. 

	So, do it in Java?


			David

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"David Byrden" <Dav### [at] byrdencomspampreventer> wrote in message
news:01bf9689$0ff28060>
> So, do it in Java?
>

Old question, same answer :)

Java is a *lot* less platform independent than POV. The current Java 2
implementation exists only on Windows, Solaris(Unix) and Linux. Not very
platform independent (from a POVish point of view)...

Johannes.

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