Why is chess not tapping into open source? In the same way that Apache or Linux has used open source to develop, why has chess not made use of Open Source? GNUChess and SCID take about 5 years to produce a version, and when they do its not World Class.

Well scid has been replaced with ChessDB and is now being actively developed. Crafty if I remember correctly is open source. There are also a few others as well.

I think because p2p file sharing is so commonplace for software as well as music & video.
Why d/l something as freeware if you can get a top quality product also for free?
It may be morally wrong but it doesn't stop a hell of a lot of people from doing it.

Crafty would not be considered to be Open Source, perhaps freeware. Open Source is something like Firefox which uses contributed code and ideas from the community to challenge world class/proprietary browsers.

If programmers/developers would mobilise and contribute code/ideas, open source chess programs would beat all efforts. How many ideas in crafty have come from the chess community?

Originally posted by z00t
Crafty would not be considered to be Open Source, perhaps freeware. Open Source is something like Firefox which uses contributed code and ideas from the community to challenge world class/proprietary browsers.

If programmers/developers would mobilise and contribute code/ideas, open source chess programs would beat all efforts. How many ideas in crafty have come from the chess community?

Originally posted by XanthosNZ
ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/source

Looks like the source is open to me.

Originally posted by z00t
How many ideas in crafty have come from the chess community? Open Source in crafty's case means that wannabe-programmers take a peak at Prof Hyatt's baby.