Author: Frank Schneider
Date: 23:47:21 11/10/98
Go up one level in this thread
On November 11, 1998 at 01:30:24, Oliver Y. wrote:
>Here's a quote from PCWorld's report on the convention at Santa Clara, CA:
>
>'Moritz and Dyson assert that the Linux operating system could prove to be one
>of the most important innovations of all as "hordes of programmers" work to
>develop applications for the so-called open source operating system, which is
>more accessible than Microsoft Windows since its source code is freely
>available. "Open source turns your customers into your developers," says Dyson.
>"It's a fundamental change."'
Recently two internal papers from Microsoft were leaked to the internet. They
are called the halloween papers. It seems Microsoft thinks that Linux is a
serious competitor in the server market. See
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/halloween.html
http://www.opensource.org/halloween2.html
But now for chess-related thoughts
>How 'difficult' would it be to have competitive software appearing in Linux?
I think it is quite easy to port engines. Many good engines are already
available on unix-platforms or started there. This includes some of the
engines that are now commercial.
>When, in a meaningful way? (not including those that are platform independent
>already)
The problem is the userinterface. It is not easy to develop portable GUIs
and developing a GUI for unix-machines only is questionable since most
users use windows. Porting GUIs from windows to unix is very hard (and that
is intended by microsoft).
I see some possibilities for getting good GUIs under Linux:
a) There is already XBoard which cooperates with many engines. Possibly someone
develops something similar to XBoard that looks more like commercial
programs.
b) There are Linux projects that try to offer the Windows32-api on Linux (Wine).
*IF* they become better porting a program to Linux would become easier.
About a year ago I tried to run Gromit1.2 under Linux (using a early
version of Wine) and it worked. Not perfectly, but one could play chess.
c) Java may become the language of choice to write GUIs. A commercial vendor
could develop a Java-GUI with pluggable engines (a protocol like XBoard
or 'Chessbase'). The GUI would be portable because of Java and porting
a (C/C++) engine is not too difficult.
d) Today 90% (my estimation, what do others suggest?) of the programmers that
write free chessprograms (including myself) concentrate on engines. Some
of them may become bored one day and start writing GUIs and databases.
As machines become faster the need to have the best engine is decreasing for
users who want to play chess themselfes.
e) The number of Linux-users increases very fast (almost doubling every year).
When there are enough users there will be a market that is interesting for
commercial developers.
IMHO c) is most likely, probably supported by b) and e). Some time ago I had
an idea how to support d) and I published a 'paper'
(see http://home.t-online.de/home/hobblefrank/index.htm and there
http://home.t-online.de/home/hobblefrank/cidleng.htm)
but there was only a little response. Anyone interested now?
Frank
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