Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Crafty Modifications MUST be made available to Robert Hyatt

Author: KarinsDad

Date: 14:05:39 02/17/99


All of these Crafty source discussions are interesting, however, they are moot.

The copyright notice is quite clear; "any changes made to this program must also
be made public in the spirit that the original source is distributed"

*  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.                        *

What this means, regardless of any spin put on it by others (including
discussions on how mankind builds upon the knowledge of other, etc.), is that if
you change the source code, you MUST make those change available to Robert.
Bottom line. This does not mean that you have to send those changes to Robert,
you just have to make those changes publicly available so that Robert can
acquire them if he so wishes.

If you modify the source code and do not do this, then you are in copyright
violation. Not only are you doing something illegal, but you are also doing
something immoral. Wrong is wrong, no matter what spin you put on it (this is my
fundamentalist personality speaking Fernando).

Let's take an example. Let's say that you have a special compiler which really
works well with the Pentium II cpu. You decide to compile the source code with
this compiler to see if Crafty runs faster compiled with it on your Pentium II
system as opposed to being compiled with VC++. You find out that vcinline.h
would execute faster if you made some assembly changes to it. You MUST make
those assembly changes publicly available. It DOES NOT MATTER if you only run
that version on your own personal Pentium II. If you change the source, you
must make those changes available.

If you do not want to abide by the copyright requirements, then you should not
be modifying Crafty source code. It ISN'T yours to do with as you will. You did
not spend thousands of hours creating it and improving upon it. You can read it
to your hearts content. Using Crafty source to create your own program
(including most of the Crafty clones which have not sent their changes to
Robert) and not making the source available is illegal. It does not matter if
you plan on eventually replacing 100% of the Crafty source with 100% of your own
source or not. Once you make a change, you must make that change publicly
available.

KarinsDad :|




This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.