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POV-Ray 3.6 Released
ehmdjii writes "After a long betatesting-phase the POV-Ray team just released version 3.6 of the popular opensource raytracer. It's been two years since the last version and many bugs have been fixed as well as some changes in the render core. This release concentrates on stability and providing a framework for future re-implementations."
Its not GPL, it was started years ago under a different license.
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I suppose no article on POV-Ray is complete without a link to the work of Gilles Tran, creator of some utterly amazing works in his 'Book of Beginnings'. It's art, it's programming (check out stuff like his Pipes macro), and it's literature - all the pictures are accompanied by am intriguing, often tangential short story, which abruptly ends mid-sentence...
Highly recommended!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
POV-Ray is not open source. The license forbids, among others, commercial distribution. In fact now that I read the 3.6 license, it seems to forbid distribution, PERIOD.
This seems to be an interesting contrast to this comment where someone (apparently a POV-Ray developer?) discusses plans to release POV-Ray under an open source license and explains why this is not currently possible:
"we can't reach many of the people who contributed the original code under the old license, so we don't have the right to just switch the license. We'll have to rewrite some pretty big chunks of code before we can think about a more open license. That (the rewrite) is slated to happen for the next major release."
Gilles Tran, the artist who made 'The Wet Bird' piece has a wonderful 9-page series of web pages on The Making of the Web Bird He's one of the best 3D artists our there in any media. You can see more of his gallery here
If you want to support this guy, he sells his work through zazzle