Hello GNU Go development team, First of all, I thanks to every one of your team and pay my respect to the great work done by you.
I'm a Chinese programmer and developed a free GO program ( a windows GUI shell exactly) base on the GPLed GNU GO years ago in my spire time, and now, the program was wide spreaded around China. The GUI program is called Deerstalking (Zhulu weiqi in chinese, the 'zhulu' which means fight with the enimies for get/gain more land of the world), and can be downloaded freely from http://guohe.tiaoa.net/download/ds.exe or http://guohe.tiaoa.net/download/ds.zip, which need's MS-Windows 2000/XP/Vista to install and playing. My question is, since I'm going to upgrade the Deerstalking(DS) and make it a commercial application, still based on GNU GO (currently GNUGO engine 3.0. 3.2, 3.4, 3.6 are supported), and the DS is closed source application, does this rebels the GUN GPL license? Here's more detailed technic information. I made a trivial modification of the GNU GO engine to make DS read information from GNU GO engine more easily, all the modified source code (two .c files of each version of the engine) are attached with the executable engine and deployed along with the DS installation. The DS GUI shell communicates with the engine by the GTP(Go Text Protocol) via the windows pipe. The GNU GO egines are compiled as seperate/stand-alone executables (.EXE file), since the engine and the gui shell are running as different process and running in different address space, and in my understood of the GPL license, they should be consided as "seperate" applications. Because all the modified source files of the GNU GO engine by me are opened source, and the DS gui shell is a 'seperate' application, so, I THINK the DS gui shell do not affected by the GPL license and can be a closed-source application, the entire system do not rebel the GPL. Here, I need your confirmation and allowance (to make DS a closed-souce code and commercial application). And here's my another hope on the GNU GO. The GNU GO has been developed about 20 years and is the first-class GO engine in the world, more and more people loving it, and more developer/company going to extend the engine or to develop commercial apps base on it in different platforms including PC/Server/Simbian/iPhone/PDA/RIA(Rich internet application) etc., in some evnironment, it's hard or impossible to use GTP/GMP protocol to communicate with the GO engine, I hope the GNU GO development team will release the engine source code in more open license such as GNU LGPL or even MIT license/BSD license in the future, so that the other developers can finish their work more easyly and more quickly. Thank you! Huang Xinmin -------------- gh...@sohu.com 2009-01-16 (January 16, 2009) _______________________________________________ gnugo-devel mailing list gnugo-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnugo-devel
