Re: [chessx-developer] auto-install of engines on Linux

[Kamil R. <kry...@gm...>]

2014-11-15 9:43 GMT+00:00 Kamil Rytarowski <kry...@gm...>:

> A chess engine is in reality a plain process parsing input stream and
> producing output. Please keep it as simple as possible. Users and
> power-users don't want to learn new config formats, custom locations, know
> that there is a thing like polyglot (for me fruit was just broken...).
>
> So my whisper is to merge polyglot (or UCI native reader) into
> xboard-protocol chess engines consumers, even if it's beyond the scope of
> this talk and mark the protocol version in the ini config.
>
>

Hello,

As I consider reusing natively polyglot in XBoard and ChessX (or any other
'GUI' - yes I know people also use chess-engines without GUI, for engine
tournaments or ICS) as an improvement there is license issue (thank you Mr.
Stallman for your sense of 'freedom'...):
- polyglot is GPLv2
- XBoard is GPLv3
- ChessX is GPLv2

GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible. polyglot needs to move to at least LGPL
for dynamic linking or permissive license (MIT/BSD) for static linking. And
then I will consider the movement towards new .ini as an improvement -- no
more obscure processes with dedicated configs around.

Best regards,