Author: Angrim
Date: 12:06:26 11/09/01
Go up one level in this thread
On November 08, 2001 at 09:52:47, Georg v. Zimmermann wrote: >At least not for me. > >I write this as a hint for people starting on a chess program or any other hobby >program, or planing to release their program. > >If you thinking about releasing it under GPL, "just say no" ! > >The last chess program which I worked on and for which I released source was my >crazyhouse program, "Sunsetter". I had the special permission of the original >author of the program it is based on, "Deep Bug", to distribute it without code >at first. After polishing the code I released it a few month ago in the hope to >get some feedback or hints on low level speed improvements or programming >technique , things I am very bad at. No suggestion ever. I think this is a matter of timing. Sunsetter was released during a period of low interest in crazyhouse programs. Back around the time of the Computer Crazyhouse Chess Championship I think you would have gotten a bit more attention. Also you have that problem that Sjeng was open source first, so the (quite few) people interested in that general sort of thing worked on it instead. Posting on here to remind people that Sunsetter is around was a good idea, I at least have lost interest in Sjeng due to the difficulty of modifying it, so maybe the next time I have an urge to mess with a crazyhouse program other than my own, you will get mail from me :) >So another chess related program I released under the GPL is called "Thief". It >is a chess client for playing on ICC, Fics, ... Like winboard, but with some >more features in some areas but no offline support for example. >It is used for more than 10% of the games on Fics. I get around 1-7 feature or >bug fix suggestion per week, but never *ever* has anyone apart from the original >programmers comtributed anything, to code grafics or whatever. (Note that >someone else did 90% of the work on this program, but he handed it over to me >later. I am no fan of re-inventing the wheel. Others seem to be though.) Remarkable, I know how popular thief is. However I think that Thief is windows only, and the percentage of windows users who are into open source is of course a bit low. <snip> >Don't get me wrong. I am not saying the open source idea doesn't ever work. It >might work for big big projects like linux, or for programs like crafty (but >here I already doubt, how many of the code improvements per version are *not* >from Dr.Hyatt?) but else - forget it. > >Next I will probably try to start on a Go program. If someone wants to try that >as a group, that would be great fun. But making it open source - no way. > >Georg Good luck, writing a GO player has been on my TODO list for years. Maybe your experience with crazyhouse(which can have almost as high a branching factor as GO) will help :) Angrim
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