Author: Uri Blass
Date: 03:30:03 10/14/01
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On October 14, 2001 at 03:34:03, Slater Wold wrote: >GPL is a good idea, in theory......... > > >Whenever you publish your code, no matter what "license" you put under it, there >is a serious threat that it's going to be hacked. > >2 good examples: > >Crafty: Without a doubt, the best open source chess project in the world. This >is not distributed under the GPL (as far as I know) but has been copyrighted by >Bob. There are more hacked Crafty's running around, than anyone can count. I >don't *think* this upsets Bob too terribly bad, as most people make it worse, >instead of better. > >TSCP: This is probably one of the most simple chess programs in circulation >today. And I know people have hacked its code; I've even seen one running on a >chess server. > >Plain and simple, you publish your code, someone is going to take it and (try) >to improve on it. And even with the GPL, it's hard to try to detour, or stop >this. > > >The company I work for has recently been to court over something that pertains >to this matter. We design and sell medical office, hospital, and in general, >healthcare software. The company I work for bought out a smaller competitor >about a year ago. Well, some people from the company that got bought out, had >the code to this software, and they thought they would just slap a new name on >it, change it around, and sell it basically as another product. Of course my >company sued them for copyright infringement. Guess what? They lost. > >Seems the law says that a computer program only needs to be 40% different, to be >considered "unique". They had a mathematician/programmer come in, and basically >declare that the code had indeed changed over 40%. Mind you, this was ONLY the >code. Not the interface, or functions. This is _NOT_ open source software. >And they got away with it. > >If anyone besides yourself has the code to your product, there is a risk. And >there's not much you can do. Someone just needs to be creative, and smart >enough to get around anything you will be able to do. The main problem here is that you need to understand Crafty in order to change more than 40% of the code. I did not read most of the chess programs because of this problem. I feel that it is frustrating to try to do it(the same as trying to read a book when for every word you need to look at the dictionary). I read most of TSCP but almost did not read other chess programs because there are too many files and I do not know where to start. I prefer to understand the move generator of Chest and not Crafty because my move generator is legal move generator like chest but I do not know where to start with so many files in order to read something that I understand. If I read move_gen.c I see that include many files when one of them is board.h If I read board.h I see that it include types.h and xatt.h. If I read types.h I see that it include basetyp.h If I read basetyp.h I see that it include basedef.h Uri
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