Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 10:45:00 01/25/99
Go up one level in this thread
On January 25, 1999 at 08:47:11, Enrique Irazoqui wrote: >On January 24, 1999 at 16:50:31, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On January 24, 1999 at 14:04:26, Ed Schröder wrote: >> >>>Just took a look at your sources I once have downloaded. I noticed >>>there is no license agreement or copyright statement at all? >>> >>>How can people know about the legal status? >>> >> >>First, look at the top of main.c.. the copyright notice is right at the top, >>and has been there since it was first released. Second, I'd think most people >>could figure out that you can just 'lift' something written by someone else and >>claim it as your own work. That's called plagerism. If you took any sort of >>English/Writing/Grammer courses in college, you were taught that when you take >>something 'verbatim' from another author you _must_ cite the source and original >>author _every time_. _no_ exceptions... >> >>I'd assume everyone has that basic training in writing? >> >>IE my son had this in 10th/11th/12th grade in high school. > >Basic training in writing would also teach you not to misspell "plagiarism" and >"grammar"... :) 'plagiarism' I totally blew. grammer was a typo. I can't run a spell-checker in netscape, unfortunately, as I can using a newsreader... > >Aside from legal and moral issues, I find confusing the meaning of freeware or >public domain. Opening books are built from human theory and used by every >program. I have never seen opening lines in computer games quoted "as in the >game Karpov-Ivanchuk, Linares '92". Tablebases are widely used too by >programmers that had nothing to do with their development. These are two quick >examples of "public domain" used freely (as in free-ware?) by everybody. I >guess I am being naive. these are not so problematic. IE if you didn't use the 'database data' in a tablebase, what part would be usable? That's all there is. > >There is a famous case in literature. When Thomas Mann published his "Doktor >Faustus", he was immediately accused of unethical behavior because he put in the >mouth of Leverkün, one of the main characters, the musical theories of >Schönberg and of the Frankfurt School, notably Adorno, without ever mentioning >his sources. Had he given credit to Adorno and Schönberg, no one could have said >anything about Mann's use or development of their theories. Does this apply to >the discussion in this thread? Imagine that a programmer uses your code as the >basis for his new program and introduces some modifications here and there, in >evaluations functions, wherever. Then he gives you credit for the source and >enters the new hybrid in a tournament for testing purposes. All programmers want >to see how successful is their baby. Would this be allowed? If not, what are the >limitations of freeware (free?) and what is the practical use of freeware if not >"take it and develop it in any way you want" (free)? I can't answer this. All I can say is that I hate to see a big advantage like the parallel search in crafty used against amateur programs every time they turn around. Developing that search was non-trivial as anyone that has tried to do so has found. It is easy to assume that because I wrote it and had it running in under 3 months, it must be easy. It wasn't. It was easier for me, because I had done it before in Cray Blitz and in other parallel things I have done. That's what started the entire discussion when the Dutch tournament started. IE if "bionic impakt" had started with a normal crafty, and modified the eval/search, I wouldn't have paid much attention. But regardless of how much of that they modified, they took a _very_ complex piece of code unchanged (the SMP search) which gave them a very significant performance advantage over the rest of the programs. _that_ is unfortunate. Because they got a 1.7X speedup on two processors after expending _zero_ effort to do so. What would _you_ do to make a program 1.7X faster? That's what started the rash of email to me right after the tournament started. I didn't sense as much concern about the chess stuff in 'bionic' as I did the tremendous advantage a dual 500+ megahertz machine gave them... > >I understand that all this thread started as a discussion about Bionic. I read >that Hans gave you due credit. I am not questioning Bionic or Hans. I am only >trying to understand what is "freeware" in general and as a learning/developing >tool. > >Enrique It isn't easy... it never was. But what 'generally' happens in a project like this is that someone gets a copy, makes changes, finds that they work well, and then sends them back to me... IE it is sort of a 'groupware' project just like Linux has been for years. Folks don't go copy linux, make changes, change the name and then say 'this is my system and it is better.' _most_ of the people that have done things to crafty send me the changes... that's where lots of the ancillary stuff (ie the upcoming HTML output from annotate) comes from. That was how it was planned from day 1...
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