Questions and Answers

Question: How Bishop3D got its name?
Answer: The first time I ever heard about POV-Ray I was browsing a chess site. Sometime later, I was reading about Binary Space Partition trees (BSP-trees) and thought that bishop would be a good name for the modeler. Besides, I think chess and ray-tracing are old fellows: chess boards and chess sets are some of the biggest clichés in ray-tracing second only to the 'reflective sphere on a checkered floor' scene.

Question: Will Bishop3D be open source?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: I will not dispute the benefits a software project can obtain by going open source, but there are some points that when added up do not make me inclined to follow this route: a) there are several open source POV-Ray modelers and it just doesn't seem to be many people out there willing to join an ongoing modeler project. b) The GUI is totally based on Borland's VCL and porting it to other platforms would require a total rewrite with a different window library. c) I need a way of funding this project.
So I choose another path: not make it open source but design a plug-in interface that will eventually allow third part developers add functionality seamlessly integrated with the native objects (the downside is that it will be very compiler specific).