Re: [XBoard-devel] some #ifdef questions

[h.g. muller]

> #ifdef GOTHIC
> #ifdef FALCON
>
> I guess these are two variants? Is there a reason to have this as ifdefs
> and not included by default?

These are two variants for which patent messages are displayed. I 
originally put
them in #ifdefs so I could remove that easily (by undefining the patent 
message).
The Gothic-Chess patent has expired anyway, so I guess we could remove the
message, but OTOH I would perceive this as a sign of disrespect for the 
original
inventor, and am pretty sure he would perceive that in the same way. Legal is
not always the same as civilized. So I would like to keep it in untill the 
original
patent holder requests us to remove it.

For Falcon Chess I don't think what WinBoard does would be covered by the
Falcon-Chess patent: it is the way of moving of the Falcon piece that is 
patented,
but WinBoard uses a "wildcard piece" to implement it, for which it accepts any
moves. So WinBoard actually has no idea of how a Falcon does move; as far as
WB is concerned -variant falcon is just a variant on 10x8 with two coies of an
unspecified unorthodox piece in the opening array. It is the engines that could
actually be covered by the patent. But to be licensed one of the conditions
is usually that they show some kind of patent messages, and for engines that
play through a GUI it would be a GUI task to show such a message. This is
why I originally programmed it in WinBoard. Of course the engine could have
used a more generic mechanism to pop up such a message (like "telluser"),
but I was not aware of this at the time.

Perhaps we have to re-think this entire thing, and in the mean time it would
be better to leave in the #ifdefs so we could still easily remove the stuff 
if that
is the outcome of our re-thinking.