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Subject: Re: Where do we stand?

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 07:03:14 04/08/01

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On April 08, 2001 at 05:22:50, O. Veli wrote:

>  Of all places, I did not expect people here to give support to cracked
>programs such as the Genius 2.

I want to know how do you know that it is not a free program today.
Did you ask Richard Lang?
Did he tell you that he decided not to do Genius2 a free program?

I guess that today there are 0 buyers of Genius2 and people who like to buy new
version of Genius are not going to avoid buying it because of the fact that they
can get Genius2 for free.

If having a strong engine that is not the best is the point they can download
Crafty or another free engine that is better than Genius2.


 Most of us know that it was the strongest program
>of its time and that it was a commercial program. Just because a program is 8 or
>10 or X years old, that does not mean that we could just download a cracked
>version of it and play with it. If you really care for the program, you can buy
>CG2 from Niggemann.



 If you want a freeware program, we know where we can find
>them and Rebel Decade 3 ( http://www.rebel.nl/decrel.htm )is the best IMO.
>
>  AFAIK abondonware is not legal yet and I have never seen a company label one
>of its programs as abondanware. Maybe chess programmers could be the first one
>to do that but why should they? I believe that their market is much smaller than
>other professional programmers. It should be up to the programmers whether to
>make a program free or not. Rebel made Gideon Pro as such and offers Decade 3
>for free.
>
>  We see more programs turning into ChessBase or MCC programs. There used to be
>more professional programs with their own GUI. We need to support more
>independent programmers if we want to have better programs every year. I am sad
>to see Genius and M-Chess leave the race. Hiarcs is also out, maybe a new engine
>for ChessBase but nothing more (How about that Macintosh lovers?). These
>programs are made for serious chess study and they do not have millions of
>potential buyers like ChessMaster has (An excellent job that they are doing with
>very strong engine but still not stable enough). These guys need our help as
>much as we need them. A couple of years ago the prices went in half. That was
>very good news for us. We need to show our support to them. Downloading a
>cracked program, and talking about how strong it is etc. is for sure not
>supporting them. If you want it, you pay for it. If you want it improved, you
>tell the programmer about that and they have really open minds in that subject.
>
>  We are a very small market and we should hang on to the good programmers we
>have. I buy the programs ( I really do not need them, but I am a fanatic ) and
>tell my friends about them. I do not get cracked versions. This is the least I
>can do. It is really up to us if we want good products in the future.
>
>  One thing I do not like about our programmers is that they did not make a
>freeware version of a program and offer it to PC magazines. There are a lot of
>people who play chess non-seriously and all they know is either GNUChess for
>Windows or Chess-it. I have seen these programs reviewed greatly and people
>really think highly of them. If they ever knew of Decade 3, or if there were a
>Fritz Light (not demo)

I remember that I read that you get Fritz4 together with chessbaselight.

Fritz6 Light is not a Demo.

It is a program that every buyer of Hiarcs7.32 or another chess engine can use
as an engine.


>, Shredder Light, Tiger Light,.... Thanks for your time.

I also remember that it was possible to download tigerlight but the strength of
this program was only about 1800.

Uri



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