Proposal withdrawn

[Daniel Sleator]

We have decided to postpone (probably forever) our proposal to
implement a commercial ICS. This is not because we decided that it is
a bad proposal, but simply because, based on the response, it would
probably not be sufficiently financially rewarding, it would be a lot
of work, and we have a lot of other important things to do.

We'll continue to run the server for free with all the current
features on the best host (or hosts) we can find. I'm looking at two
offers now. I think they will both have more lag than coot did.
Expect some moves in the near future while we look for the best place.

Vishnu has about finished implementing several new features that were
intended for the commercial ICS, including simuls, and the ability to
examine (play through) a library of stored games. Expect to see these
on the server in the near future.

I (Darooha) am still not convinced of the advantages of making the
code public. I find it humorous that some people's response to the
pay proposal was to offer money for the development of a free one!
Maybe if that money was offered to me, I would just release the code
now, and save everybody a lot of trouble! Make me an offer! :-)

There is a way to salvage much of the thinking (and legwork) we've
already put into the pay server proposal. Now that we've found a
commercial host, we could run grandmaster matches, simuls, and any
other pay events we wanted to. Only those who had bought tickets
could participate in the events. These events would be totally
independent of the ICS. If you want to get involved organizing such
events, let us know, and we can start to work on it.

Darooha, Vishnu, TheDane, AnteTempore

[Axel Boldt]

slea...@cs.cmu.edu writes:

>Maybe if that money was offered to me, I would just release the code
>now, and save everybody a lot of trouble! Make me an offer! :-)

Put it under the GNU license and you'll get my 50 bucks.
Axel.