Crafty Licensing

[jshriver]

This will pertain mostly to Dr. Hyatt and hope he answers. As always I feel crafty is one if not the strongest open source engine.

I'm working on a project called "Golden Tree" and need an open source engine to use. The code changes are small, and so far for internal use I have used crafty, and it's mostly been disabling and small code change to make it work with what I want.

But I wanted to make it so other could contribute, hense distributing a derived binary. So licensing internally and externally is becoming an issue.

The use is not for tournament use, but to capture statistical data in a parallelized way.

Is this ok? If need be I'll gladly post my code changes and submit them to Dr. Hyatt for approval beforehand.

Just checking what's available.
Thanks
-Josh

P.S. This project is nearly 1.5 years old, just finally had time to really do it.

[Dirt]

Are you using the tablebase code? If so, then from what I've read there seems to be no fully legal way to do what you want without the permission of the author of that code.

[sje]

I don't know about the licensing terms, if any, for the egtb.cpp (tablebase) code in Crafty's source. I do see that some of my old code is in that file, and I don't have any objections to people using that (as long as said use doesn't infringe on others' usage).

If needed, one could always revert to my tablebases from back in the early 1990s along with their rather simpler and faster accessing code. And although I never got around to making six man tables, having all of the three, four, and most of the the five man files is still pretty good. All of the code and data is free for others to use and always has been.

[jshriver]

Good point, but I did get an email from Mr. Nalimov years ago saying I had permission to use his code in my own engine, not sure if this counts.

But for the bulk of my research I'm dealing with opening/middle games, so not as concerned with end game at this stage, bit I do want to leave it open.

-Josh

BTW I did make a site describing my goals:
http://olympuschess.com/goldentree/

Are you using the tablebase code? If so, then from what I've read there seems to be no fully legal way to do what you want without the
permission of the author of that code.

[bob]

This will pertain mostly to Dr. Hyatt and hope he answers. As always I feel crafty is one if not the strongest open source engine.

I'm working on a project called "Golden Tree" and need an open source engine to use. The code changes are small, and so far for internal use I have used crafty, and it's mostly been disabling and small code change to make it work with what I want.

But I wanted to make it so other could contribute, hense distributing a derived binary. So licensing internally and externally is becoming an issue.

The use is not for tournament use, but to capture statistical data in a parallelized way.

Is this ok? If need be I'll gladly post my code changes and submit them to Dr. Hyatt for approval beforehand.

Just checking what's available.
Thanks
-Josh

P.S. This project is nearly 1.5 years old, just finally had time to really do it.

This does not cause me any problems at all...

Bob