🚀 go-pugleaf

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Anthony wrote:
>
> So I've an other question : what is the interest you find in
Gnu Chess ;
> I've just play with it once without any gui .... I havn't
anything against
> it, but I would know why Gnu Chess is so famous ;-)

Age, and the success of the GNU project, probably explains it's
fame, various versions have been around since... well let us
just say the Linux kernel is still quite young in comparison,
and Stuart now has other (less famous) offspring.

Of the free chess programs (those you can read and modify the
source code, and redistribute, rather than gratis) it is the
oldest project of it's kind I know of. Some old chess programs
are around, but often the copyright position is ambiguous, or
restrictive, or written in an obselete computer language.

Thus where people want a GPL'ed chess engine to integrate into
websites, or port to a new computer system, it is immediately
clear to them what licence applies to a GNU project application.

There are now quite a few chess engines under the GPL (now!), or
other wellknown free software licences, but we still get a
steady stream of people using the GNU Chess engine because they
just want a chess engine. When we explain how the comms protocol
works they usually go away happy realising that their project
will probably work with many chess engines.

Some of the older versions had a built in GUI, but these days
most free engines are just text based, and you use a GUI of your
choice.

There have been several code base changes, and I'm sure if a
demonstrably better engine were offered that supported the same
protocol, and the GNU platforms, the GNU project might adopt it
as the codebase for GNU Chess 6, as neither of the original
developers of the GNU Chess 5 code base have been able to
contribute much recently.

I gather the GNU project is going all GNOME on us, and there is
talk of adopting a GNU Chess GUI program into the project now
that the standards battles have been resolved and we know what
the target environment looks like.

The main advantages of belonging to the GNU project now for an
application are prestige/easy recognition of the GNU name, as
various free software projects now provide mailing lists, CVS
respositories, websites for no charge to developers.

For me personally I wanted to fiddle with chess engines without
having to write my own from scratch, and I wanted to learn more
about Free Software, and improve my knowledge of C programming,
so when I saw the GNU Chess project was in need of some extra
help I thought it was an ideal opportunity.

Despite being hard work at times, and hard to find the time to
get things done, it is a rewarding project to contribute to.

 Simon
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