Am 16.03.2013 16:55, schrieb Timwi:
> On 15/03/2013 22:30, clipka wrote:
>> Am 15.03.2013 20:03, schrieb Timwi:
>>> Well, neither of those turn the GUI off. All of them open a POV-ray
>>> editor window, do the render (visibly!) and then exit.
>>>
>>> This way, rendering a hundred images requires me to either run 100 GUI
>>> instances, or run them one after the other. In both cases, my computer
>>> is completely unusable for quite some time while windows keep popping
>>> up.
>>>

>>
>> There are various reasons for this, one being a series of "copyleft
>> infringements": At some time various people thought it was ok to sell
>> commercial software that deliberately hid the fact that the actual
>> rendering was done with POV-Ray; at that point, it was decided to have
>> the Windows version always fire up the GUI. (At least that's what I've
>> heard tell.)
>
> Surely the correct response to that is to sue the perpetrator, not to
> massively inconvenience all Windows users...

Lawsuits were filed, as a matter of fact - but law is slow to take 
effect, and it didn't help that the copyleft concept was still 
comparatively new back then. (Not to mention that quite a lot of money 
had to be thrown at those lawsuits to fight them through; AFAIK the last 
of them was still ongoing at the end of the POV-Ray 3.7 beta phase, and 
one of the problems slowing down 3.7 development in those days was that 
Thorsten was working hard to make the necessary money to keep those 
lawsuits running.)

As for "massively" inconveniencing "all" Windows users: Most Windows 
users have been happy to run their renders from within the GUI, and 
Windows never really made batch processing easy anyway, so people 
requiring batch processing would typically turn towards Linux in the 
first place.


Times are changing, and judging past decisions based on today's 
circumstances is cheap, and moot besides if the decision is already 
being revised. As I said, we're likely to see a revival of the 
command-line-only POV-Ray version for Windows.

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