Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Programmer's opinions abut "closed source" wanted.

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 06:08:26 12/23/05

Go up one level in this thread


On December 23, 2005 at 05:43:13, Paul Jacobean Sacral wrote:

>IIRC the release of Toga 0.93 was changed to be entirely correct under the Gnu
>public license conditions, and 1.0 and 1.1 were always correct. You may ask who,
>and why, still saw a problem nevertheless: The "problem" was T.Gaksch's releases
>always were stronger than the just recently before released Fruit versions, they
>were based upon. --> Source closed.
>
>A good idea to collect software improvements: Make it open source, see what
>others contribute as improvements, then close source and make a lot of $$$
>bucks!

Such absurd distortions of history make me very angry.  Fabien's
contributions to the community have been enormous (I am not only
thinking about Fruit, but also about PolyGlot, which is almost as
important but frequently forgotten).  I sincerely hope that he feels
he has received at least some compensation for his generosity.
Although Fruit is of course almost 100% Fabien's own work, I suppose
he must have had some benefit from the the advice and testing efforts
of other members of the computer chess community (Joachim Rang is
the most obvious name).

However, claiming that the "contributions" (I put the word in quotes
because not a single line of Thomas' additions are present in Fruit's
code) of Thomas Gaksch have been an important factor is beyond
ridiculous for anyone who has had more than a cursory look at Fruit.
There are *lots* of people in the computer chess community who
deserve much more credit than Thomas for the rapid improvement
of Fruit.

I am not attacking Thomas Gakasch, by the way.  He was wrong to
initially try to hide the fact that Toga was a Fruit clone, but I accept
his apology.  What I attack are the insane misinterpretations of
history which you and Eduard present as truths.  Attentive readers
will notice that Thomas himself never makes such claims.

Tord



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.