[computer-go] Collaboration project. Once again

[Mark Boon]

On 2-aug-2006, at 11:59, Dave Denholm wrote:

> But if it's open source, how do you stop other people stealing your
> code and ideas and selling their version for cheaper ?

There's no stealing possible since eveything is public. Since it's  
not going to be a finished product or full playing program, there's  
nothing to sell. If people want to base a commercial product on the  
framework, then they are welcome to it.

>
>> The only way it's not free is that initially I'll be
>> the only one deciding what will go into the project.
>
> But again, depending on license, someone else can just copy your
> source tree and then have a project where *they* get to dictate what
> happens. (GPL allows this. gnuplot has a license which aims to prevent
> this.)

I don't intend to stop that by restrictions in the license. If people  
like to take what they see and use it to go their own way, they are  
free to do so. But by doing so, if they deviate considerably, they  
won't benefit from future effort going into the framework. My aim is  
to gather enough collaborative effort into this project that it won't  
pay to deviate to the point of incompatibility. I think that is the  
nature of all good open-source projects.

There will always be people who like to take advantage of an open- 
source project without contributing back. That can't be helped.  
Hopefully one day it will reach a level where actively participating  
in the collaboration will turn out to be more fruitful to people  
really interested in pushing the state-of-the-art of computer Go than  
just taking the source-tree private at some point and then going it  
alone.

Maybe this is a bit of an idealistic hope of mine, but I'm going to try.

	Mark

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