Portable chess program
John Buck
This is not deja vu, rather a re-posting of the information on how to
get my Chess Program written in C. People are still sending requests,
so I must assume they did not see the first posting of THIS article for
some reason. Anyway, here it is again:
I have received at least a hundred requests for my portable chess program
written in C. I would have gladly posted it to net.sources, but there are
some problems with doing that. It is quite illegal. I had plumb forgotten
about the licensing end of chess. The original chess sources were included
with V6 and V7, and as such, were part of those license agreements.
I can not therefore redistribute without securing copies of one of these
source licenses from each person that wants chess.
Note that a System III or System V license is unacceptable, since the chess
sources are not included with System n.
So, if all those people out there STILL want a copy, I'll be more than
happy to give it to you, all you have to do is:
1) Send me a SAST (Self addressed, stamped tape). This means
it must have adequate postage to get it BACK to you. I'm just
going to put the tape in it, and send it back.
2) A copy of your Unix V6 or V7 SOURCE!!!! license.
3) Instructions on how you want the tape made, density, tar, cpio,
card image, whatever.
A word of warning: If you do wind up getting a copy of this program, note
that it may NOT be included in any package intended for sale. IE
Company X can not say 'We have chess for our machine', you must obtain
permission from AT&T and me, since more than half of the code had to be
changed by ME.
I want to thank the people who suggested to me that chess was STILL an
AT&T licensed piece of software. They saved alot of grief.
Note: I thought about posting 'diff' output to net.sources, but it was
almost as big as the sources, and, listed damn near all the code. Sorry.
John Buck
Polytechnic Institute of New York
Rm. 246
Route 110
Farmingdale, NY 11735
(516)-454-5191
(decvax!mcnc!rti-sel!polyof!john, trixie!polyof!john, philabs!ron1!polyof!john)
Ozan Yigit
>I have received at least a hundred requests for my portable chess program
>written in C. I would have gladly posted it to net.sources, but there are
>some problems with doing that. It is quite illegal. I had plumb forgotten
>about the licensing end of chess. The original chess sources were included
>with V6 and V7, and as such, were part of those license agreements.
chess program distributed with V6 and V7 has been
around a looong time, *in public domain*, and could be found
on many a RSX-11/RT-11 decus tapes. Just the fact that Bell
included in their distribution *does not* give the rights to that
chess program to Bell. I would gladly post at least one *slighly*
improved version of that program in PDP-11 assembler to net.
It is found in the Joint European RSX-SIG and European
VAX SIG tape (Amsterdam 1980). In fact, the very same chess
program is found in our HSC-50 !! (cute! very cute !!!) I could
probably dig up the original as well, as found on RSX-11 systems.
Perhaps somebody from Bell could enlighten me as to the origins
of V6/V7 chess. If they claim rights to it, fine, I will post
all the versions of the RSX-11 chess, which is likely to be quite
identical to V6/V7 chess. You could simply assume that the C version
is generated from one of these !!! You could let AT&T worry about
suing the rest of the world.
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David Sherman
>sources are not included with System n.
I question this. My understanding has always been that a System
III license includes the rights to everything which came with
v7. We have a System III license, in fact, but AT&T sent us
the tapes for v7 (at my request, since that's all we could run).
Dave Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Toronto
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