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Subject: Re: Open source engines and licensing

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 03:56:55 02/24/06

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On February 23, 2006 at 23:32:18, James Swafford wrote:

>I've decided to make Prophet available for download as an open source
>engine ( http://chessprogramming.org/prophet )

Great news!  I look forward to trying it out on my Mac.  :-)

>Before I do, I need to decide on what license to distribute it under.
>I haven't put a great deal of thought into this, but basically I
>don't want someone to take it, change a few lines, and call it their
>own.  I won't mind if someone uses it and modifies it, as long as
>it's "known" that it originated from Prophet.
>
>Further, I don't want to compete against Prophet derivative in a chess
>tournament, not that that's much of a threat to anyone right now.

I don't really think you have to consider this particular problem when
choosing what kind of license to use.  The rules for all serious
tournaments prohibit derivative works anyway, so there is no big need for
a clause about this in the license.

>I'd be interested in hearing what licenses other open source engines
>are using and any issues that may have arisen, or if you wish  you
>had distributed it differently.

I am using the GPL, and haven't seen any problems.  My experiences with
open source are 100% positive, and I happy that I decided to release the
source code.  My program is probably stronger than most open source engines,
but still nobody has tried to clone it.

Tord



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