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Subject: Re: SMIRF licencing - OpenSource chess

Author: Reinhard Scharnagl

Date: 12:06:07 01/14/06

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On January 14, 2006 at 13:57:40, Janosch Zwerensky wrote:

>> I think, that
>>freeware chess programs are dumping the whole scene, killing any respect and
>>refund of creative programmers. So I am very demotivated and now about to start
>>with programming the game of Go instead of improving the SMIRF chess program.

>Note that one of the strongest presently existing Go programs (GnuGo) is open
>source and freeware. Hence, if you feel demotivated by the existence of strong
>free open sourced chess programs, I tend to doubt whether moving to Go
>programming will help.

Hi Janosch,

well it is a hard job not to be misunderstood. I think that having OpenSource
projects participate in brainsport events is unfair, when a lot of people try
to compete by joined power with the work of single individuals. In Chess such
projects have reached the playing strength of masters, in Go there is still
sufficient distance between top players and programs to have some hope left.

And of course, a lot of people are very satisfied patchworking foreign code
pieces into a strong engine. Adding some percent of (hopefully) own thoughts
seems to allow them then, to join their name to that result. I am not inter-
ested in such a sort of 'programming'. Some days ago I read about the dog-
picture-easteregg in PHP. Why could it take that long to be detected by all
those OpenSource 'programmers'?. It seems, that most people merely are copying
instead of understanding. Hardly that should be the purpose of OpenSource.

It might be the view of some freeware 'customers' always to have the best chess
program available, not worrying at all about the sources, which might have been
included. But that should not be the perspective of creative programmers.

I already have noticed, that this my opinion belongs to a minority. But that
does not take the right from me, to argue for that position. There is no need
to blame me for my viewpoint. In contrast to the joined forces of OpenSource
'programmers' this does not unfairly affect anyone else.

Reinhard.



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