This ground has been covered over and over, but I'll remind you that we are talking about plagiarism. The FSF which STANDS for freedom strongly disagrees with you on this. It's not ok to plagiarize. Moral society has some bounds on what is acceptable and this is not.jdart wrote:If you want to work on app servers, you can join an existing project like Tomcat. If you want to work on compilers, you can join the GCC project and contribute improvements. If you want to work on operating systems you can become a Linux comitter. I don't think anyone would consider you a second-rate programmer, or not an innovative one, because you were doing this on an existing foundation, vs. starting your own compiler project (for example). In fact these projects wouldn't have existed and advanced without a lot of dedicated contributors.
(Most commercial closed-sourced development is also like this. If you are in an early stage startup, you get to code stuff from scratch. But otherwise, you are probably fixing bugs and adding features to something that's existing, or at least building an add on of some sort that has to work with existing software).
So why is computer chess different?
--Jon
Ed's arguments are just another way to justify plagiarism and dishonesty - by denying what is actually happening and trying to make it seems modern and new - but theft is very old and ancient.
If you want to work on an EXISTING project and share credit and be constrained by their rules, then there is nothing wrong with that. That's not what we are talking about here and nobody is going to care if some chess project is started where everyone is free to contribute. I'm all for that.
There are hundreds if not thousands of chess programs and this is not like compiler technology where there are only 3 or 4 compilers getting 99% of the usage. The compiler is a tool that we all need and there is no real need for incredible diversity or interesting variations. In fact the goal for compilers is that they should all just work the same. It makes huge sense to work together on projects like that.
Ed is suggesting that it's just plain ok to take anybody's program as a starting point and start your own chess project from that, WITHOUT any regard to the rule of law or the licensing or the feelings of those who did not want their own work plagiarized.
If I came into your home and starting taking stuff out and then attacked you for not being willing to share wouldn't you fight back? I cannot understand the lack of compassion that Ed and others have for Fabien and his hard work and a complete disregard for how HE feels about it. To me this is the height of immorality - it's rape. Now you and others are arguing that everyone should just be entitled to rape and that it's just the way of the world and just be declared acceptable.