On Fri, 8 May 1998 08:50:21 -0600, "Jeff Hauswirth" <jha### [at] csnnet>
wrote:

>Is there much interest by other developers for this ActiveX control?
>It would have a bunch of methods/properties that would allow
>you to set the rendering options, fire off the rendering into your window,
>then notify you that its done rendering.

I appreciate your enthusiastic desire to improve POV-Ray however what
you propose is a violation of POVLEGAL.DOC -- the general license
under which everyone is permitted to recompile and/or distribute
POV-Ray.  Specifically we state that you cannot link our code into
other applications.  This includes not only compile-time linkage but
run-time linkage as well.  Therefore turning POV-Ray into a DLL or
ActiveX package is not allowed because it links our engine into your
code.  Further, the license prohibits anything which obscures the fact
that the user is running our freeware renderer.  Creating a DLL makes
it much harder to distinguish which part is our renderer and which
part is the 3rd party product.  Unsuspecting users will pay for
shareware or commercial front-ends thinking they are buying the whole
package when in fact they're getting a simple menu system.

Even if your intent is NOT to unscrupulously make money off of a cheap
front-end and a POV-Ray DLL, it opens the door to anybody to do it.

Although we feel POVLEGAL.DOC already prohibits such practices, we
will probably add language to future versions of our license to make
sure people understand our intent.

As you know, our current POV-Ray for Windows allows the user to
substitute any editor for ours.  It provides GUI-Extension hooks and
operating system shell-outs so that POV-Ray can control other external
stand-alone tasks.  If you have suggestions on how we can improve the
interface without inviting rip-off front-ends, we'll be happy to
consider them.
	Chris Young, POV-Team coordinator.

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