Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto
Date: 01:53:38 12/11/01
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On December 10, 2001 at 20:55:51, Carmelo Calzerano wrote: >I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but in my opinion releasing an >open source program to be studied an modified by others brings to >different choices in balancing complexity and readability, thus >leaving less freedom to the programmer. >The main reason I don't release Leila sources (even if I feel I >should, since I learned almost everything I know about chess programming >studying other programmers work) is because I think it couldn't be >useful, due to its unreadability... >BTW, since you are one of the best known open-source programmers >around, I really would like to have your opinion about that. I can't judge how your code looks of course, but I think that in general, if the idea of opening up your sources is to share your ideas, then people will be able to get them out even if the code is quite messy. Another way to share your ideas is to simply post them here on this board. Perhaps some other people will make comments on them that can enhance them even further. One way to look at it is that if you publish it and nobody understands a thing about it, you will still not have lost anything. I personally have never bothered about code readability in Sjeng. If possible, I try to write things in a simple clean way, so I can still understand it fully myself later on. But I would not make compromises just to make it easier for someone else to understand it. If I really need to add something and I have no time or mood to do it cleanly, I will hack it in. rcfile.c in Sjeng is/was a nice example of this. Other people have made suggestions, and on very rare occasions contributed code to Sjeng, despite the fact that it is also quite messy and contains a gazillion obscure global variables with silly names. Maybe that would have happened more if the code would have been more structured, but I really doubt it. I think that you should generally _not_ expect outside contributions to be a gift of open source programming. People like ESR have been widely claiming it, but it's simply not true for >90% of the open source projects out there. -- GCP
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