[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance license

[Charles Ehrlich]

Hi Tom,
 
I was working at LBNL during the time that the Radiance license was working its way through the LBNL Patents office.  This was during Greg's stint at SGI then Shutterfly when I acted as the surrogate (illigitimate) father of Radiance.  It was a long and sordid trail through the anals of a huge bureaucracy.  I think I first brought up the idea of an open source license in 1992.  There were at least five different stakeholders whose interests had to be balanced in coming up with the license that exists now.  But before we could even get the Patents office attention, we had to show that it was a commercially viable technology and that it wasn't stepping on any big player's toes.  It was through the sales of 3 or 4 $10,000 older-style licenses to folks like Georg Mischler that got their attention.  I did quite a bit of patent research and found some potentially conflicting claims held by Pixar for stuff related to pseudo-random adaptive subdivision of the image plane.  This was resolved
 by writing Pixar a letter telling them our plans and never getting a response.  And strangely enough, once the LBNL patents office had some money to stash away to help in the legal defence against the possibility that someone could become "harmed" by using Radiance, they were then willing to listen to another, less costly, open-source-like licensing scheme.  We hammered on them about various license schemes including GPL and OSF, etc.  The final touches on the license were completed after I moved onto greener pastures.  But in the end, what we've got is much better than we expected.  My suggestion is not to bother the likes of Steve Selkowitz, and to make what we've got work for you, and if it doesn't, look for your ray tracing solution elsewhere.
 
-Chas
 
 
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