Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 16:13:03 02/27/04
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On February 27, 2004 at 18:31:18, Telmo Escobar wrote: > If, after five years of publicity, you say "no way", everybody would assume you >cheated... No they wouldn't. >and that means the rest of your life of negative publicity. No it doesn't. >That would >prove fatal if you were a young programmer trying to get a name in the >profession. No it wouldn't. Based solely upon the fact that a person declines to show their source code, there is no evidence of cheating. Cheating is not even the most obvious suspicion. There could be any number of reasons to keep your source code private. * To protect your trade secrets * Contractural obligations * Financial reasons * Prevent cloning of your program * Very messy source code * "I lost the source code, sorry." To say that someone would live the rest of their live with negative publicity is ridiculous. First, not that many people pay attention to computer chess. If the President of the United States does something stupid, that might give him negative publicity for the rest of this life, but not from keeping the source code of your computer chess program private. How many people remember the names of those who have created Crafty clones in the past? Maybe a few, but not that many. To say that the person would not be able to get a job as a programmer is also ridiculous. Do you think Microsoft is going to not hire a very talented programmer because he wouldn't show his source code? Most software companies don't show their source code either... Declining to show your source code really doesn't imply cheating at all. There must be other evidence to indicate cheating. If there is strong evidence of cheating, and you decline to show your source code, that still doesn't mean much. As I said above, there are many very good reasons not to show your code. Cheating is way down the list.
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