Author: Roger Brown
Date: 11:18:44 11/09/05
Go up one level in this thread
>It is no better in German than in English. This is completely absurd. :-( Hello Tord, Absurdity abounds. > >You will find it hard to find *any* programmer who consider this to be unfair. >Toga is about 99% Fruit and 1% additions by Thomas. He has been given >almost the entire program for free. Even if we forget for a moment that >not disclosing the source code is illegal, is it really unfair that he has to >give his little additions back to the community? No, not at all. Yet the arguments continue. > >The truth is that you are free to take anything you want from Fruit 2.1 >(algorithms, data structures, coding style, and so on) without ever having >to give anything back. This is an enormous gift to the community. This seems to have been lost in the melee. Alas, this was seen some time before.... A lesson to you Tord. One day you might find yourself in a similar position. Then you will have persons telling you that: (a) Going commercial was wicked since you started out free (b) Could they have free versions of your programs for testing etc? (c) Could they copy your program with some changes and call it theirs? (d) Now that you are commercial then all your improvements from your own code must be released. Sigh. >The only thing you cannot do without distributing your source code is >to copy the actual source code of Fruit (or parts of it), but there is >absolutely no reason to do so except pure laziness. Such laziness is >not likely to be met with lots of sympathy from the community. Hmmmm, I disagree. Should the result be a strong clone then the community will be very sympathetic. Any examples that you can think of? >It is OK to express dislike for the GPL license, there are a lot of people who >don't like it. Basing a program on GPL software and later complaining >about the consequences, on the other hand, is sheer stupidity. Nobody >forced Thomas to base his program on Fruit. The POINT! I cannot understand the difficulty of this single point which goes to the root of all the noise generated around this topic. Tord, you are one of the good guys. Please hide your source code, particularly the code of your more interesting forays into computer chess programming (Scatha et al). Fabien gave us a great free engine. I cannot understand the sheer volume of illogical material written here. Later.
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