Houdini destined to become another comercial engine

Mr. Houdart,

Apparently you are not selling Houdini. I suppose you could. But, since you aren't, could you let us know what your opinion is of open source in general and why you presumably are not interested in publishing your work via some open source license such as GPL, which is how Stockfish is published? Thank you. Also, do you have plans to go commercial?

Charles writes

Actually I am curious about something ...
What if I want to keep my software free for now but eventually want to sell it -- If i make my program open source GPL - can I then change this license?

Still, even if I could -- others would see my source so this would not be in my best interest ... So I might have answered the question ,....

~~~~~~
Robert Houdart writes ......................


we await his answer

R H answeres

I have no plans to go commercial, it would remove the fun aspect of the project. Or maybe I'm just not hungry enough :).

I very much admire Stockfish and Crafty for their clear and well documented code, both these project have an important educational value. It would require a major effort to make the Houdini code as well structured and documented as either of these great examples. Publishing the source code to this standard would be very time-consuming and create additional constraints for future developments, which could very well slow down the progress of the chess engine.

In short, both going commercial and open-sourcing the code would create additional constraints of which I'm currently very happy to steer clear.

Robert


I have no plans to go commercial, it would remove the fun aspect of the project. Or maybe I'm just not hungry enough

[b] No plans to ? But you may become hungrier ?
Hard ly an emphatic answerw is it

You also stated preiviously that you had no problem reveling the code once it was "cleaned up "..now you provide weak exscuse for not revealing it