On May 23, 8:08=A0am, Michael Ben-Yosef <septa...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Now I see that at some stage Pixar has updated the RISpec3_2.pdf
> do***ent from version 3.2 to version 3.2.1. (I'm sorry if this is very
> old news to everyone, but I haven't seen much mention of it.) The
> visible difference to me is that the "Statement About Pixar's
> Copyright and Trademark Rights" on page 214 now no longer requires
> that a no-charge license be obtained from Pixar for anyone who wishes
> to write a renderer that uses the RI interface.
I, for one, had not noticed that. I'll update the FAQ appropriately.
Note, though, that this doesn't explicitly say anything about the
Shading Language, only the RI procedures and RIB requests. I'm not
sure if that's intentional or not.
> "The
> foregoing statements of permission expressly do not include permission
> to reproduce the specifications for the RenderMan Interface." This
> means that any modeller or renderer following the RI Spec cannot
> reproduce the standard governing its use other than to link to Pixar's
> online copy of the Spec
athttps://renderman.pixar.com/products/rispec/risp=
ec_pdf/RISpec3_2.pdf
> . Should Pixar decide to take that do***ent off its site, a conforming
> program is left completely stranded in terms of do***entation.
I am not a lawyer, but I think the interpretation of this is that they
may not reproduce the RI Spec *do***ent* (the PDF file we're talking
about). You may write your own do***entation, in your own words,
describing the spec. Copyright only protects a particular expression,
not the ideas therein.
> Do the authors of Gelato envisage it's API as a possible alternative
> standard to the RI?
That was the idea, yes. We weren't actively promoting it to be widely
adopted, but we wanted to be clear that we were tearing down all
possible roadblocks to other people using the APIs that we had
developed, and in particular wanted to repudiate the notion of
do***ented APIs being used as fodder for litigation.
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