[prog] General purpose 3d graphics engine

Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com
Mon Feb 2 00:40:29 UTC 2009


Miriam,

Read the POV-Ray Modification License at
http://www.povray.org/source-license.html; it is very restrictive
regarding modifications and the distribution thereof.  It's not open
source, it's just gratis source.  You can look at the source and play
with it a bit, but sharing any changes you make requires jumping
through a bunch of hoops, and if you want to give back your changes
you have to hand over all rights to them.  Finally, they're free to
revoke your license at any time and go commercial, with no recourse
for you even if you were one of the contributors who contributed code.

They've had this licensing model since at least 1998, when I first
encountered POV-Ray.  The only change I see from then is some language
intended to make them "compatible" with Open Source distributors
without actually changing their license (their old one made it illegal
to bundle POV-Ray with any other product, which kept them out of Linux
distributions; the new language allows this), and does not reflect a
substantial change in philosophy.

This licensing regimen is all about protecting their brand and their
proprietary interests, while at the same time inuring to themselves
the benefit of any user-contributed code and ports.  This isn't open
source, nor is it in the spirit of open source; rather, it's a form of
parasitism, in which you put a product out there and encourage other
people to fix it for you, then when it gets good enough from such
work, you take what they've created and go commercial, with nothing
more for them than a "thank you very much" for their efforts.

As a long-time open source developer, I must insist that POV-Ray and
their licensing model not be considered open source.

MegaPOV isn't open source either, as distributions of MegaPOV are
subject to all the same restrictions as POV-Ray.

Kelly

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Miriam English <mim at miriam-english.org> wrote:
> Hi Kelly,
>
> I partially agree. POV-Ray was freely and openly sharing its source since
> way before the days of GNU Public License, "Open Source", CreativeCommons
> and other permutations. I believe they have been looking at different
> licensing options, including GPL. I don't know the state of such decisions
> at the moment, but while POV-Ray is open source, it may well be said that it
> is not "Open Source". It's not likely to affect most people though as it
> doesn't hamper making money from your artwork or sharing the standard
> version. And MegaPOV is a freely distributable modified version of POV-Ray
> so I doubt their restrictions are very onerous. But thanks for the pointer.
> I'll have to look into that.
>
> Best wishes,
>
>        - Miriam
>
> Kelly Martin wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Miriam English <mim at miriam-english.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> POV-Ray http://www.povray.org/
>>> -------
>>> POV-Ray is another free, open source 3D program that began back in the
>>> 80s, before the open source movement had a name. It has been ported to
>>> virtually every operating system in existence, including, of course,
>>> Linux.
>>
>> POV-Ray is not open source.  Their license agreement places
>> significant restrictions on redistribution of modified versions that
>> are inconsistent with most open source definitions.
>>
>> Kelly
>>
>>
>
> --
> My time wasn't completely wasted last year.
> I went on a 940 million kilometer journey.
> -----
> Website: http://miriam-english.org
> Blog: http://miriam_e.livejournal.com
>


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