FWIW there's some discusssion over in c.g.r.renderman about how pixar had
sued Larry Gritz and the company he started (Exaluna), resulting in BMRT
being withdrawn from the market (as well as Larry's new renderer). Plus
Exaluna was bought by Nvidia.

-- Chris

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Chris Cason wrote:
> FWIW there's some discusssion over in c.g.r.renderman about how pixar had
> sued Larry Gritz and the company he started (Exaluna), resulting in BMRT
> being withdrawn from the market (as well as Larry's new renderer). Plus
> Exaluna was bought by Nvidia.
> 

Same very topic was discussed a little bit in p.off-topic (thread 
"NVIDIA bought Exluna", dated 2002-07-23).
Sometimes I wondered, whether POV-Ray team held quite low profile (no 
cost, no support, restricted use by third-party tools etc.) for the very 
same reason: not to step to toes of some big company. Imagine, that 
someone wrote plugin for using POV-Ray as renderer for some modeller (or 
any other modelling package) and previous renderer provider feels like 
losing its income and tries to sue team, e.g. for patent infringement, 
as it's quite possible, that POV-Ray implements some patented algorithm(s).
Of course in case of Pixar vs. Exluna situation was quite complicated, 
as "core" people in Exluna were from Pixar and undoubtedly Pixar's folk 
had fear, that know-how, aquired in Pixar, was used against them.
I do hope, that Pixar won't go against other free/OS implementations of 
RenderMan....

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news: 3d48fe4e@news.povray.org...
> FWIW there's some discusssion over in c.g.r.renderman about how pixar had
> sued Larry Gritz and the company he started (Exaluna), resulting in BMRT
> being withdrawn from the market (as well as Larry's new renderer). Plus
> Exaluna was bought by Nvidia.

What's a little unsettling is that, after Blender, it's the second free
popular CG software to go down in a few months, and both for reasons that
have apparently little to do with the actual merits of these products
(though this is debatable of course).

G.


--

**********************
http://www.oyonale.com
**********************
- Graphic experiments
- POV-Ray and Poser computer images
- Posters

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> What's a little unsettling is that, after Blender, it's the second free
> popular CG software to go down in a few months

Blender is not down yet.

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Artis wrote:
> > What's a little unsettling is that, after Blender, it's the second free
> > popular CG software to go down in a few months
>
> Blender is not down yet.

Yes. Quite the opposite according to www.blender3d.com. They're over halfway
to getting together the 100k ? needed for belnder to live again and as open
source. And that's just in a bit over a week.

--
-Jide

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In article <3D4### [at] comtradeee>,
 Vahur Krouverk <vkr### [at] comtradeee> wrote:

> Same very topic was discussed a little bit in p.off-topic (thread 
> "NVIDIA bought Exluna", dated 2002-07-23).
> Sometimes I wondered, whether POV-Ray team held quite low profile (no 
> cost, no support, restricted use by third-party tools etc.) for the very 
> same reason: not to step to toes of some big company. Imagine, that 
> someone wrote plugin for using POV-Ray as renderer for some modeller (or 
> any other modelling package) and previous renderer provider feels like 
> losing its income and tries to sue team, e.g. for patent infringement, 
> as it's quite possible, that POV-Ray implements some patented algorithm(s).

    I'm quite sure that if they saw some benefit in it, there are some 
companies that could go after the POV Team. There are so many stupid 
patents out there that it is probably impossible to write a major piece 
of graphics software without violating a few. One of the tesselation 
patches infringes on the patent on the marching cubes algorithm. That 
Pixar patent seemed (as far as I could tell, I'm no expert) to apply to 
anything that used randomized sampling, so it could cover media, 
radiosity, focal blur, scenes that use averaged textures with different 
normals, jitter in the antialiasing, area lights, or photons...

    There must be quite a few patents that could be interpreted as 
applying to other things in the official version. And most attempts to 
use these patents against POV would be utterly rediculous but very 
costly to fight. (when did patents go from a protection to a weapon?)

-- 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>
POV-Ray TAG e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
TAG web site: http://tag.povray.org/

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Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom> wrote:
> That 
> Pixar patent seemed (as far as I could tell, I'm no expert) to apply to 
> anything that used randomized sampling, so it could cover media, 
> radiosity, focal blur, scenes that use averaged textures with different 
> normals, jitter in the antialiasing, area lights, or photons...

  What I don't understand about many of these algorithm patents is that many
of them use principles which were first described by mathematicians, often
a really long time ago (eg. in the 1700's or whatever).
  The scheme seems to be the following:
  1) Get an idea for an algorithm.
  2) Use a method first developed by a mathematician (often hundreds of years
     ago) to implement this algorithm
  3) Patent this algorithm. (Since you seemingly can patent *anything* in the
     US, this shouldn't be a problem.) Word the patent so that it practically
     covers that mathematical method (ie. in practice patent that mathematical
     method!)
  4) Wait a few years.
  5) Sue everybody who is using this algorithm, or most importantly, anyone
     using *any* algorithm based in the same principle developed by that
     mathematician hundreds of years ago.
  6) Since patents are seldom voided (because people usually don't have the
     money necessary for this process), collect winnings. Don't give a rat's
     ass about fair play.

> (when did patents go from a protection to a weapon?)

  When companies got big and greedy.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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Vahur Krouverk wrote:

> Chris Cason wrote:
>> FWIW there's some discusssion over in c.g.r.renderman about how pixar had
>> sued Larry Gritz and the company he started (Exaluna), resulting in BMRT
>> being withdrawn from the market (as well as Larry's new renderer). Plus
>> Exaluna was bought by Nvidia.

The problem is that, to my knowledge, Larry Gritz had actually worked for
Pixar, so he had insider knowledge of the REYES engine, not just memorized
public specs (nobody has sued the POVMAN patch writer).

Anyway, REYES is 1980's technology with only one great idea: programmatic
shader description. Just think that it cannot antialias textures by itself
(you have to do it by hand in you shaders code... even the simplest 
raytracer out there has not this limitation!).

Bye!!!

-- 
Alessandro Coppo
a.coppo@<REMOVE_ME>iol.it
www.geocities.com/alexcoppo

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