Attn: Mr. Hyatt - Ippolit and CCT rules

[Hood]

Lets solve the licensing situation other way.

Create the proper council to give certifications to the programms.
This council will verify all programms closed-, open-, free-, commercial-.
I think that possibility of going through for some commercial programms could solve some problems concerning others programms

rgds Hood

[BB+]

Miguel indicates that I was copying the license of the Gaviota engine, and not the probing code. He then states that the probing code is under the MIT license.

My error seems to stem from the fact that the subdirectory gaviota-linux64-v0.74.41/licenses has three licenses, one for gaviota, one for tbcheck (identical to the former), and one for tbcp. I had looked at all three, but had concluded that "tbcp" was simply for the compression of the tablebases (two imported libraries are mentioned separately in that file), and not the probing code per se. Maybe I had thought that tbcp was "tablebase compression" rather than "tablebase compression and probe". The newer version on his website also more clearly puts the phrase "Gaviota Tablebases Probing Code API" at the top of this license file, whereas it did not appear anywhere in the older version I had.

[notyetagm]

That is a difficult question. At the moment there is a claim that it is a reverse-engineered Rybka 3. No real evidence to support this. A few table similarities only. There is more evidence that it is not a RE Rybka although there may be some common parts for all we know. The problem for CCT, ACCA and ICGA events is that the author has to enter the program or else appoint someone to do this. Without any known author for the IP* family, there's no way to get past this hurdle. No, just "taking over the source, modifying it" doesn't get past the original author's responsibility, otherwise someone could reverse-engineer anything anonymously, make the source available, have an accomplice then "take over" the code and enter it at will.

I believe that for the moment, everyone has decided to not accept any ip* family member until the author issue has been resolved, which may be never. We've never had a case like this one where there is a strong program and anonymous author(s) so there is not much in the way of precedent to deal with this specific circumstance. In general, the author is the one to be protected from any "damage" by the claims of "you have a clone or whatever," but with no visible author this seems to not be an issue. Then the other authors should be protected by not allowing a questionable program to participate when no author is available to discuss the program's origins in detail. This is a catch-22 that boggles the mind.

Refreshing to see a well-reasoned, objective post on the Ippolito family.