Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 11:33:50 03/03/04
Go up one level in this thread
On March 03, 2004 at 13:43:49, Bas Hamstra wrote:
[snip]
>I fact the sole purpose of TSCP was education. "Look, this is the guts of a
>chess program in 1000 lines, everyone can do it. Take it and improve it". And it
>still is highly succesful as such. I think there is a BIG difference between
>basing upon TSCP, which was written in 3 days and hardly more than a framework
>to learn from, and basing upon Crafty which is a fully developed state of the
>art chess program with > 5 years work in it.
E:\tscp>copy *.? blob
board.c
book.c
data.c
DATA.H
DEFS.H
eval.c
main.c
protos.h
search.c
tscp.c
1 file(s) copied.
E:\tscp>wc blob
2314 Lines, 8742 Words, 66517 Characters
(tscp.c is a tiny stub I used that looks like this):
/*
** This strange little beastie has only one purpose:
** To allow the compiler to inline like a madman.
*/
int king[2];
#include "book.c"
#include "search.c"
#include "board.c"
#include "data.c"
#include "eval.c"
#include "main.c"
With 2000 lines of code, that is about 200 hours of effort. Given a 40 hour
work week, that would be 5 weeks to do it. I expect if you ask him about how
much time (including all the revisions, documentation, etc.) it will have been
at least that much effort he put into it. If you can do it in 3 days, then you
are a miracle worker.
200 hours times $100/hour = $20,000 worth of effort.
Allow me to quote from Tom's readme.txt file:
"LEGAL STUFF
According to copyright law, you are not allowed to distribute copies of TSCP
or anything that's derived from TSCP without my authorization.
Version 1.4 of TSCP is the first version to include copyright notices, but
previous versions are also protected under law. If you are distributing an
earlier version of TSCP or a derivative work without my authorization, you are
acting illegally.
For more information about copyrights, visit this web page:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/"
I don't think you can say the intentions any more clearly than that. Tom is a
very reasonable person. I expect that anyone who asks will get permission. For
sure, though, the use of TSCP as a framework deserves a mention of thanks in any
readme.txt file for a derivative work. Yes, even if ten years later there is
not a single line of TSCP left in it. In my view, the accreditation should be
perpetual.
> With GNU somewhere in the middle.
>"Basing" on Crafty and not mentioning it stinks, IMO. Not many will have a
>problem with doing so with TSCP.
But those people are doing something just as wrong as if they had used crafty.
It is unethical, illegal (and in my view) immoral.
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