Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 15:21:31 02/16/99
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On February 16, 1999 at 17:54:55, wayne johnson wrote: >Could you please explain the problem/abuse that is occuring with the use of the >crafty source code. I have not been online for a few weeks. I have not yet down >loaded crafty source code. I would like to just learn the basic essentials >required in making a chess program as a hobby--not to make one for any sort of >profit. It seems that some people may be in violation of the copyright agreement. In the crafty source code it says: "Crafty, copyrighted 1996 by Robert M. Hyatt, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham. All rights reserved. No part of this program may be reproduced in any form or by any means, for any commercial (for profit/sale) reasons. This program may be freely distributed, used, and modified, so long as such use does not in any way result in the sale of all or any part of the source, the executables, or other distributed materials that are a part of this package. any changes made to this program must also be made public in the spirit that the original source is distributed. Crafty is the "son" (direct descendent) of Cray Blitz. it is designed totally around the bit-board data structure for reasons of speed of ex- ecution, ease of adding new knowledge, and a *significantly* cleaner overall design. it is written totally in ANSI C with some few UNIX system calls required for I/O, etc. main() is the driver for the chess program. its primary function is to cycle between asking the user for a move and calling for a tree search to produce a move for the program. after accepting an input string from the user, this string is first passed to Option() which checks to see if it is a command to the program. if Option() returns a non-zero result, the input was a command and was executed, otherwise the input should be passed to input() for conversion to the internal move format." The salient part of the notice which relates to the problem in question is: "any changes made to this program must also be made public in the spirit that the original source is distributed." It seems that it is possible that people are taking the Crafty program, making a few secret changes of their own, then entering it in contests as a new program. Not only unfair, but a bit underhanded.
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