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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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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Not to talk about the speed difference between C and Java.
  POV-Ray is already slow enough. Let's not make it even slower.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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>   Not to talk about the speed difference between C and Java.
>   POV-Ray is already slow enough. Let's not make it even slower.
This may be correct on our current Hardware, where javacode is processed in
a
virtual machine, emulated by software ... but have you heard about the
current Transmeta-Crusoe-Processor, able to run every binarycode (with the
correct microcode) in Hardware ..
Future becomes present ..

--
jan walzer <wal### [at] informatikuni-hallede>

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