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"POV-Ray is free... the internet isn't!"
An open letter from POV-Team coordinator
Chris Young
One of my greatest pleasures as POV-Team coordinator is the
joyful emails I get from people who are surprised and grateful that
such a great program is free. Even in an impersonal medium like
email, you can feel the joy and amazement when they see what a free
program can do. Its like Santa just brought them a wonderful free toy
for grown-ups!
It reminds me of my early years growing up in the late '50s in
middle-class, midwest, suburban America where my life as a 5 year old
was so carefree. We weren't rich but there was always food, clothes,
and toys in abundance. Relatives were generous on birthdays, Santa
delivered free stuff each year and when you wanted a gum ball at the
store, Mom always had an extra penny to put in the machine.
It really shocked me one day when I saw Mom give money to the
milk man. I asked why and Mom said "You gotta pay for it silly!". I
though milk delivery was a free service from the government! Further
investigation revealed that we don't pay the mail man but that stamps
cost money. You don't pay the garbage man but there was something
called taxes involved there too. How horrible!
Somehow the internet community has adopted that same innocent
idea that I had at age 5 that everything is free or at least very
inexpensive. Its true that for $15-$20 a month I can get unlimited
access, email and even my own home page. However once you create
something people want to see, the costs can skyrocket.
Team member Chris Cason has managed to negotiate various deals
to maintain our sites ftp.povray.org and www.povray.org for the past
several years. Proceeds from CD-ROM sales and the small income from
our CompuServe GO POVRAY forum have helped to subsidize the expense
but recently things have gone way beyond the Team's ability to
support.
In a recent month, we used over 100 gigabytes of bandwidth at
a cost of over $1,200 per month! Clearly we aren't going to sell that
many CDs on a continual basis. We've tried to minimize our site to
improve things but that's just a temporary fix. We hope to do later
round beta testing and eventually full public release of POV-Ray 3.1
at povray.org which will make matters even worse.
It is painful for me to be so blunt but I must remind everyone
that POV-Ray existed before povray.org and POV-Ray can continue
without povray.org if need be. We are close to folding up the whole
operation unless we can get corporate sponsorship for the site.
We do not want individual donations from users. It would be
too hard to handle hundreds of $5-$10 donations. Also the POV-Team is
not officially incorporated either as profit or non-profit. Donations
can create tax problems for us. Here are a few suggestions on how you
can help -
o if you work in the industry (or any industry that could benefit
from sponsoring some of the www.povray.org costs) you should
talk to your employers about sponsorship.
o ditto for advertising. if you have a product, talk to your
employers about possibly advertising on the site.
o if you work in the retail industry, you could lobby their buyers
to consider making a purchase of some IRTC CD's for resale.
Our hope is that if a large bunch of users start lobbying
their bosses, we might see some things happen. Please contact us at
w10### [at] povray org if you can help.
The important thing to remember during this crisis is that the
5-year-old kid in me and in the other POV-Team members is still fully
committed to keeping POV-Ray itself fully free for the 5-year-old kids
in you. We will not sell POV-Ray itself, but it is beginning to cost
us quite a bit of money just to offer it to you for free. If we hope
to be able to deliver it for free, we're going to need some help.
cy
p.s. feel ree to re-post this to other newsgroups or online services.
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