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Subject: Re: About Fafis...

Author: Michael Yee

Date: 04:39:33 05/30/05

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On May 30, 2005 at 04:00:22, Mridul Muralidharan wrote:

[snip]

>But you are correct - even I dont really care about clone issue (you publish the
>source , you expect others to use it - else dont publish it !) , and as I said
>before , if I ever do opensource any of my programs , I still wont care if
>someone clones them :)

[snip]

I partly agree with you--if you publish the source, it's kind of expected that
others will borrow ideas or even actual code.

But I think most people (e.g., users) would simply like to *know* when that
happens. In the academic world, you need to cite all references. If an engine
author mentioned that, for example, he used FEN parsing code from crafty, eval
ideas from crafty, and move generator code from tscp, it would be

(1) interesting for users,
(2) helpful for other beginning programmers (since they'll have a fuller picture
of the lineage of their perhaps "suddenly strong" opponents in tournaments),

and, most importantly,

(3) showing respect and thanks to the original sources.

Is that so much to ask?!

The Toga situation illustrates this pretty well. Users really ultimately care
about engine strength. But they (at least partially) care about the route taken
to get there. Once the true lineage of Toga was made known, the situation was
acceptable to most people.

Michael



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