Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 18:10:12 08/03/01
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On August 03, 2001 at 17:28:24, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >On August 03, 2001 at 16:48:47, Roy Eassa wrote: > >>Does the existence of such strong free programs eat into profits? Might it >>signal the beginning of the end for commercial programs? (I hasten to say, I >>keep buying 'em, especially now that they no longer cost USD$100+ apiece.) > >How many versions did they sell then, and who for **** sake can get >a winboard version to work except a few freaks who are like 0.001% of >the people big companies like chessmaster and CB sell to? My guess is that Winboard engines ENHANCE program sales. We become enthralled by the strongest Winboard engines, and want more delightful and intricate moves to be made at our beck and call. I played with Winboard engines long before I bought any commercial software. The big difference between Winboard engines+Winboard and commercial systems is features of the commercial systems, ease of use and ease of installation (as Vincent pointed out). With SCID you can get a pretty nice free database also. But the professional offerings like Chess Assistant are certainly more fully featured and easy to use. I suspect that SCID will also sell a lot of chess database systems, rather than compete with them. I have both SCID and commercial chess database, and I like them both. Winboard engines can be used to ENHANCE commercial systems, since they are able to operate the Winboard engines. I very much like the brave reverse direction that ChessMaster has made, in allowing ChessMaster to run as a Winboard engine! If I just wanted to play chess on FICS, I would rather use Winboard to do it. If I wanted to use a chess engine, then certainly ChessMaster 8K would be a top choice for that arena as well. Similarly, I don't think that tools like GCC will ever hurt the compiler sales for the commercial vendors. I have GCC, but also buy every compiler in sight if I think it can help me to do my job better. Free stuff like that really has no downside, that I can see.
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