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POV-Ray Is Now FLOSS

Posted by timothy on from the gifts-to-all dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Starting with version 3.7, POV-Ray is released under the AGPLv3 (or later) license and thus is Free Software according to the FSF definition. 'Free software' means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them. Full source code is available, allowing users to build their own versions and for developers to incorporate portions or all of the POV-Ray source into their own software provided it is distributed under a compatible license (for example, the AGPL3 or — at their option — any later version). The POV-Ray developers also provide officially-supported binaries for selected platforms (currently only Microsoft Windows, but expected to include OS X shortly)." Update: 11/14 21:57 GMT by U L : The previous distribution terms and source modification license.

6 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What was the previous license by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POV-Ray#Licensing

  2. Re:What was the previous license by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Previously released under the "a href="http://www.povray.org/povlegal-3.6.html">POV-Ray License.

    One of those somewhat oddball project-specific licenses that are free-ish, in spirit; but either through some specific limitation, or just bad/old wording, inconveniently incompatible with most 'Free as in FOSS' projects.

  3. Re:AGPL ... DOA License by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    AGPL is GPLv3 with one added term: any modified program that exposes functionality through a service over a network must be a quine.

  4. Re:bad summary by Enry · · Score: 5, Informative

    Us old timers know what it is. It's a ray tracer from the early early days (it was used to render one of the covers of my books back in the mid 90s). I honestly thought it went the way of the dodo since I haven't heard about it in years.

  5. Re:bad summary by shawnmchorse · · Score: 4, Informative

    Very old timers remember using DKBTrace before it turned into POV-Ray. I actually called the "You Can Call Me Ray" BBS that originally hosted all of this, too. It's nice sometimes when a project like this from a completely different era is still alive and kicking.

  6. Most users won't care about the change by JDG1980 · · Score: 3, Informative

    This isn't a case of a previously commercial program going open-source. It is a relatively minor licensing alteration to an existing product.

    The changes may be of interest to die-hard Stallmanites, and to companies that want to make a profit from POV-Ray derivative works (assuming there are any), but to average users it's a big nothingburger.