Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto
Date: 14:28:02 05/02/00
Hi all, while toying around with 'Queen' I took a closer look at the about window: <quote> This program uses part of the opening book of GNU Chess 3.1 by D.K.Baker, 1990 </quote> This is the header of the relevant file from the GNU Chess 3.1 distribution: ! Opening Library for CHESS ! ! Copyright (C) 1986, 1987, 1988 Free Software Foundation, Inc. ! Copyright (c) 1987 by Stuart Cracraft and John Stanback ! ! This file is part of CHESS. ! ! CHESS is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, ! but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. No author or distributor ! accepts responsibility to anyone for the consequences of using it ! or for whether it serves any particular purpose or works at all, ! unless he says so in writing. Refer to the CHESS General Public ! License for full details. ! ! Everyone is granted permission to copy, modify and redistribute ! CHESS, but only under the conditions described in the ! CHESS General Public License. A copy of this license is ! supposed to have been given to you along with CHESS so you ! can know your rights and responsibilities. It should be in a ! file named COPYING. Among other things, the copyright notice ! and this notice must be preserved on all copies. The CHESS General Public license is functionally identical to the GPL license. (Actually I think they are the same but the GPL name probably didn't exist in 1987 yet) As the opening book contains the notice, and is included in the queen.exe file, it most definetely classifies as a derived work. Therefore 'Queen' is in direct violation of several parts of this license, most notably lack of source code, failure to preserve the notice and failure to provide the 'copying' file. Either Leen must stop distributing Queen immediately, publish its sources, or seperate the book from the main executable. Considering the potential interest in the sources and the educational value of them, I hope Leen chooses the second option. -- GCP
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