>But perhaps I miss something about "subverted by leechware" ?

You'd have to go back a few years, and be aware of some of the history of v2.0.
It's not really worth digging that up now ; all I'll say is that experience
with v2 heavily influenced a v3 decision we made to not make it too easy to
integrate with.

POV-Ray for Windows was originally intended to be just what was suggested - two
parts, a rendering engine and a front-end. The rendering engine was to be
written in portable C. This is why, even to this day, POV-Ray for Windows has
the name 'PVENGINE.EXE' and has most of its UI written in C (apart from the
editor). It was really intended to only be a very simple rendering engine that
was called from another application. We didn't really want to have a UI in it.

Additionally, (history again), it was originally written under Win32s (Windows
3.1) which didn't have threads. When '95 came alone, we added some Win32
support, but it still has a lot of its heritage from the Win32s days.

So, what we have today is the result of a number of compromises, since Win 3.1
was still a very viable platform at the time, plus a deliberate decision made
by the team as a whole (not just one person) to limit the ways that an external
program can use our renderer.

There is work afoot on a new version of POVWIN which will be split up (a team
member alluded to this a few weeks ago in an IRC chat with Twyst) but I can say
at this time that, again, the rendering portion will not be a DLL or ActiveX
control. Comms will be via TCP/IP (using a well-known port number already
allocated to POV-Ray by the IANA). It will not support Windows 3.1x. It will
support distributed network rendering. There is no date set. It may not even be
this year. Please don't bug us about it.

Again, however, we shall be taking steps to prevent subversion of our software
by unscrupulous developers who want a free ride. (Yes, such persons exist, like
it or not). This may make it difficult for others who do respect our software,
but that, as they say, is life. Please respect our wishes in this respect by
not hassling us over it.

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