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Subject: Re: Did Ferret ever become Freeware?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 18:01:06 11/17/04

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On November 17, 2004 at 20:55:22, Albert Silver wrote:
[snip]
>You might consider asking another long-time chess programmer like Ed Schroder or
>even Bob Hyatt. Not that I think they spend time punching cards on maintenance
>time as opposed to development time, but still...

I think the hard part will be coming up with accurate figures from any of them.

When you are programming as a hobby, you don't write down all the time you spend
reading books, tinkering with alrgorithms, debugging, etc.

And only a few chess programmers have bothered to go professional.

So someone who keeps fastidious records will probably be hard to come by.

On the other hand, I would be very interested to know if my estimates fall into
line with what professional chess programmers have experienced.  If they have
not, I would be especially keen to find out why.

I also suspect that computer chess programmers are among the worst paid software
engineers in the world considering their skill level.

But I might be wrong about that.  I don't know much about their pay scale.  But
considering how few units are sold (except for ChessMaster) it seems it would be
very hard to make it become actually worth while.

I consider every chess software I buy an incredible bargain.  And the free stuff
-- amazing.

But there are other amazing projects where all the labor is dontated too (e.g.
PostgreSQL database).



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