Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 11:26:00 02/15/04
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On February 15, 2004 at 14:21:06, Jaime Benito de Valle Ruiz wrote: >On February 15, 2004 at 14:12:05, Dann Corbit wrote: > >>On February 15, 2004 at 14:08:24, Jaime Benito de Valle Ruiz wrote: >> >>>Does that mean that we can be sued for using ideas such as using bitboards... or >>>a 64 bytes array to represent the board? >> >>You can be sued if you are innocent. Software is an extrememly complex matter >>and I doubt if 1% of judges or juries would be able to make a competent >>decision. Therefore the quality of the legal team will probably determine the >>outcome. >> >>>The only two pieces of code that I have ever copied are: >>> >>> 1) A few lines to read the input, because I didn't know how to do this. >>> 2) A branchless assembly version of a 64-bit BSR/BSF for 32-bit processors. >>> >>>The implementation (but not the original ideas) of typical chess engine search / >>>evaluation functions are mine... because I don't like reading other people's >>>code. Do you advice to start sending lots of mails to lots of people asking for >>>the permission to use their ideas if I ever decide to send my program to a >>>tournament (or make it commercial)? >> >>Yes. It is not a legal necessity, but I think it is a good idea. Probably, we >>don't write more than one new routine a day. That's not a lot of emails. >> >>>All this sounds a bit extreme to me. >>> >>>Regards, >>> >>> Jaime >> >>Like any idea, it has both a positive and negative aspect. > >The only problem is: How do I know who should I write for every thing that I do? Write to the person where you got the idea. If it is from a book or a paper, then to the book or paper author. If is is from code, then to the one who wrote the code. If you make it up yourself, you can still be in violation (especially for a patent). Commercial software systems will do a patent search to see if they violate any patent ideas. For instance, certain types of bitmap indexes cannot be used -- even if you make the idea up by yourself because there are several patents on bitmapped indexes. For that reason, I never use bitmapped indexes. >I know who should I ask for permission if I ever implement the tablebases (and I >will ask), but I'm not sure about the rest of the stuff. >Thanks for the advice in any case. I think that a minimal courtesy that should always be extended is to at least cite the sources from which the information came.
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