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75-537: GNU Chess is a free software chess engine and command-line interface chessboard . The goal of GNU Chess is to serve as a basis for research, and as such it has been used in numerous contexts. GNU Chess is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version, and is maintained by collaborating developers. As one of the earliest computer chess programs with full source code available, it

150-428: A negative or positive liberty . Due to their restrictions on distribution, not everyone considers copyleft licenses to be free. Conversely, a permissive license may provide an incentive to create non-free software by reducing the cost of developing restricted software. Since this is incompatible with the spirit of software freedom, many people consider permissive licenses to be less free than copyleft licenses. There

225-466: A software license whereby the author grants users the aforementioned rights. Software that is not covered by copyright law, such as software in the public domain , is free as long as the source code is also in the public domain, or otherwise available without restrictions. Proprietary software uses restrictive software licences or EULAs and usually does not provide users with the source code. Users are thus legally or technically prevented from changing

300-430: A contract offering payment to a reader who notices the clause. As an April Fool's Day joke, Gamestation added a clause stating that users who placed an order on April 1, 2010, agreed to irrevocably give their soul to the company, which 7,500 users agreed to. Although there was a checkbox to exempt out of the "immortal soul" clause, few users checked it and thus Gamestation concluded that 88% of their users did not read

375-529: A copy of the free application itself. Fees are usually charged for distribution on compact discs and bootable USB drives, or for services of installing or maintaining the operation of free software. Development of large, commercially used free software is often funded by a combination of user donations, crowdfunding , corporate contributions, and tax money. The SELinux project at the United States National Security Agency

450-406: A customer agreed if they did not return the product within a specified interval. After the advent of the internet, EULAs are more often found in clickwrap format where the user only needs to click an agree button. Without the constraints of having to print the license, the length of the agreements ballooned. Another type of license, browserwrap , intuits the user's consent after they simply visit

525-537: A draw with Ruslan Ponomariov . It is often used in conjunction with a GUI program such as XBoard or GNOME Chess , where it is included as the default engine. Initial versions of XBoard's Chess Engine Communication Protocol were based on GNU Chess's command-line interface . Version 6 also supports the Universal Chess Interface (UCI). Since version 6.1 GNU chess supports a graphical mode for terminal emulators. The first version of GNU Chess

600-436: A drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $ 60 billion per year. Eric S. Raymond argued that the term free software is too ambiguous and intimidating for the business community. Raymond promoted the term open-source software as a friendlier alternative for the business and corporate world. End-user license agreement An end-user license agreement or EULA ( / ˈ j uː l ə / )

675-561: A fee. The Free Software Foundation encourages selling free software. As the Foundation has written, "distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!". For example, the FSF's own recommended license (the GNU GPL ) states that "[you] may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for

750-450: A fee." Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated in 2001 that "open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." This misunderstanding is based on a requirement of copyleft licenses (like the GPL) that if one distributes modified versions of software, they must release

825-494: A for-profit, commercial activity or not. Some free software is developed by volunteer computer programmers while other is developed by corporations; or even by both. Although both definitions refer to almost equivalent corpora of programs, the Free Software Foundation recommends using the term "free software" rather than " open-source software " (an alternative, yet similar, concept coined in 1998), because

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900-432: A large number of employees often negotiate the licensing agreement with the vendor. According to one study, economic competition from different software services leads to EULAs more favorable to the customer. According to United States federal law , a company can restrict the parties to which it sells but it cannot prevent a buyer from reselling the product. Software licensing agreements usually prohibit resale, enabling

975-465: A provision to sell the user's soul to the company. The source code (or compiled binaries in the form of object code ) of a computer program is protected by copyright law that vests the owner with the exclusive right to copy the code. The underlying ideas or algorithms are not protected by copyright law, but are often treated as a trade secret and concealed by such methods as non-disclosure agreements . Software copyright has been recognized since

1050-508: A result, players could lose access to purchased content if the vendor decides to terminate their license and withdraw the content. Most EULAs disclaim any liability for harms caused by the product, and prevent the purchaser from accessing the court system to seek a remedy. There has been substantial debate on to what extent EULAs can be considered binding. Many EULAs contain stipulations that are illegal and therefore unenforceable. Software vendors keep these unenforceable provisions in

1125-571: A significant part in the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the infrastructure of dot-com companies . Free software allows users to cooperate in enhancing and refining the programs they use; free software is a pure public good rather than a private good . Companies that contribute to free software increase commercial innovation . "We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that

1200-498: A small set of licenses. The most popular of these licenses are: The Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative both publish lists of licenses that they find to comply with their own definitions of free software and open-source software respectively: The FSF list is not prescriptive: free-software licenses can exist that the FSF has not heard about, or considered important enough to write about. So it

1275-412: A website and are made aware of the terms of use . EULAs are often written in vague language, and do not inform the customer of the limitations on the agreement's enforceability. Most EULAs have been designed so that it is very difficult to read and understand them, but easy to agree to the licensing terms without reading them. Regardless of how easy it is to access, very few consumers read any part of

1350-467: Is a legal contract between a software supplier and a customer or end-user . The practice of selling licenses to rather than copies of software predates the recognition of software copyright , which has been recognized since the 1970s in the United States. Initially, EULAs were often printed as shrink wrap contracts , where tearing the shrink wrap indicated acceptance. Software distributed via

1425-617: Is an example of a federally funded free-software project. Proprietary software, on the other hand, tends to use a different business model, where a customer of the proprietary application pays a fee for a license to legally access and use it. This license may grant the customer the ability to configure some or no parts of the software themselves. Often some level of support is included in the purchase of proprietary software, but additional support services (especially for enterprise applications) are usually available for an additional fee. Some proprietary software vendors will also customize software for

1500-443: Is based on Fabien Letouzey's Fruit 2.1 chess engine . According to CEGT version 5.60 of this code base is stronger than Fruit 2.3, the latest version of that chess engine. Free software The right to study and modify a computer program entails that the source code —the preferred format for making changes—be made available to users of that program. While this is often called "access to source code" or "public availability",

1575-466: Is biased by counting more vulnerabilities for the free software systems, since their source code is accessible and their community is more forthcoming about what problems exist as a part of full disclosure , and proprietary software systems can have undisclosed societal drawbacks, such as disenfranchising less fortunate would-be users of free programs. As users can analyse and trace the source code, many more people with no commercial constraints can inspect

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1650-545: Is consistent with the intended meaning unlike the term "Open Source". The loan adjective " libre " is often used to avoid the ambiguity of the word "free" in the English language , and the ambiguity with the older usage of "free software" as public-domain software. ( See Gratis versus libre . ) The first formal definition of free software was published by FSF in February 1986. That definition, written by Richard Stallman ,

1725-488: Is credited with tying it to the sense under discussion and starting the free software movement in 1983, when he launched the GNU Project : a collaborative effort to create a freedom-respecting operating system , and to revive the spirit of cooperation once prevalent among hackers during the early days of computing. Free software differs from: For software under the purview of copyright to be free, it must carry

1800-451: Is debate over the security of free software in comparison to proprietary software, with a major issue being security through obscurity . A popular quantitative test in computer security is to use relative counting of known unpatched security flaws. Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products that lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available. Free software advocates strongly believe that this methodology

1875-463: Is like considering the practical advantages of not being handcuffed, in that it is not necessary for an individual to consider practical reasons in order to realize that being handcuffed is undesirable in itself. The FSF also notes that "Open Source" has exactly one specific meaning in common English, namely that "you can look at the source code." It states that while the term "Free Software" can lead to two different interpretations, at least one of them

1950-409: Is lower, but has been enforced in some cases where it can be proven that the user was presented with the terms of use and continued to use the website. EULAs are primarily legal documents with IT terminology. As such, knowledge in several different domains may be necessary to produce a satisfactory translation. There have been numerous attempts to make fun of EULAs not being read. Some EULAs bury

2025-495: Is not endorsed by the FSF and does not use Linux-libre, it is also a popular distribution available without kernel blobs by default since 2011. The Linux community uses the term "blob" to refer to all nonfree firmware in a kernel whereas OpenBSD uses the term to refer to device drivers. The FSF does not consider OpenBSD to be blob free under the Linux community's definition of blob. Selling software under any free-software licence

2100-601: Is not in the IT sector choose free software for their Internet information and sales sites, due to the lower initial capital investment and ability to freely customize the application packages. Most companies in the software business include free software in their commercial products if the licenses allow that. Free software is generally available at no cost and can result in permanently lower TCO ( total cost of ownership ) compared to proprietary software . With free software, businesses can fit software to their specific needs by changing

2175-531: Is one of the oldest for Unix -based systems and has since been ported to many other platforms . GNU Chess 6.2.5 is rated at 2661 Elo points on CCRL 's 40-moves-in-2-minutes list. For comparison, the strongest human player , Magnus Carlsen , has achieved an Elo rating of 2882. On the same list, Fritz 8 was rated at 2665 Elo, and that program in the 2004 Man vs Machine World Team Championship beat grandmasters Sergey Karjakin , Veselin Topalov and reached

2250-415: Is permissible, as is commercial use. This is true for licenses with or without copyleft . Since free software may be freely redistributed, it is generally available at little or no fee. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as customization, accompanying hardware, support, training, integration, or certification. Exceptions exist however, where the user is charged to obtain

2325-521: Is possible for a license to be free and not in the FSF list. The OSI list only lists licenses that have been submitted, considered and approved. All open-source licenses must meet the Open Source Definition in order to be officially recognized as open source software. Free software, on the other hand, is a more informal classification that does not rely on official recognition. Nevertheless, software licensed under licenses that do not meet

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2400-644: Is still maintained today and states that software is free software if people who receive a copy of the software have the following four freedoms. The numbering begins with zero, not only as a spoof on the common usage of zero-based numbering in programming languages, but also because "Freedom 0" was not initially included in the list, but later added first in the list as it was considered very important. Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible. Thus, free software means that computer users have

2475-613: Is summarized at the Debian web site. It is rare that a license announced as being in-compliance with the FSF guidelines does not also meet the Open Source Definition , although the reverse is not necessarily true (for example, the NASA Open Source Agreement is an OSI-approved license, but non-free according to FSF). There are different categories of free software. Proponents of permissive and copyleft licenses disagree on whether software freedom should be viewed as

2550-756: The Apache web server; and the Sendmail mail transport agent. Other influential examples include the Emacs text editor; the GIMP raster drawing and image editor; the X Window System graphical-display system; the LibreOffice office suite; and the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems. From the 1950s up until the early 1970s, it was normal for computer users to have the software freedoms associated with free software, which

2625-830: The GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. He developed a free software definition and the concept of " copyleft ", designed to ensure software freedom for all. Some non-software industries are beginning to use techniques similar to those used in free software development for their research and development process; scientists, for example, are looking towards more open development processes, and hardware such as microchips are beginning to be developed with specifications released under copyleft licenses ( see

2700-744: The Linux kernel and other device drivers motivated some developers in Ireland to launch gNewSense , a Linux-based distribution with all the binary blobs removed. The project received support from the Free Software Foundation and stimulated the creation, headed by the Free Software Foundation Latin America , of the Linux-libre kernel. As of October 2012 , Trisquel is the most popular FSF endorsed Linux distribution ranked by Distrowatch (over 12 months). While Debian

2775-661: The OpenCores project, for instance ). Creative Commons and the free-culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement. In 1983, Richard Stallman , longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , announced the GNU Project, saying that he had become frustrated with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and its users. Software development for

2850-410: The source code was distributed to use these programs. Software was also shared and distributed as printed source code ( Type-in program ) in computer magazines (like Creative Computing , SoftSide , Compute! , Byte , etc.) and books, like the bestseller BASIC Computer Games . By the early 1970s, the picture changed: software costs were dramatically increasing, a growing software industry

2925-462: The 1996 ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg in the United States, shrinkwrap licenses were not held to be binding, but since then they often have been. In some shrinkwrap cases the customer was found not to have consented to the EULA and was therefore not bound by it. Clickwrap has been found generally to be enforceable —even when the license terms are provided after the sale. The enforceability of browserwrap

3000-557: The Free Software Definition cannot rightly be considered free software. Apart from these two organizations, the Debian project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines . Debian does not publish a list of approved licenses, so its judgments have to be tracked by checking what software they have allowed into their software archives. That

3075-490: The Free Software Foundation (FSF) recommends against thinking in those terms, because it might give the impression that users have an obligation (as opposed to a right) to give non-users a copy of the program. Although the term "free software" had already been used loosely in the past and other permissive software like the Berkeley Software Distribution released in 1978 existed, Richard Stallman

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3150-631: The GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. An article outlining the project and its goals was published in March 1985 titled the GNU Manifesto . The manifesto included significant explanation of the GNU philosophy, Free Software Definition and " copyleft " ideas. The Linux kernel , started by Linus Torvalds , was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991. The first licence

3225-525: The Internet. Users can easily download and install those applications via a package manager that comes included with most Linux distributions . The Free Software Directory maintains a large database of free-software packages. Some of the best-known examples include Linux-libre , Linux-based operating systems, the GNU Compiler Collection and C library ; the MySQL relational database;

3300-531: The agreement. During the installation of version 4 of the Advanced Query Tool the installer measured the elapsed time between the appearance and the acceptance of the end-user license agreements to calculate the average reading speed. If the agreements were accepted fast enough, a popup congratulated the users for reading several hundred words per second. South Park parodied this in the episode " HumancentiPad ", where Kyle had neglected to read

3375-631: The agreements, perhaps because users rarely resort to the legal system to challenge them. Under the New Digital Content Directive effective since 2022 in the European Union, EULAs are only enforceable to the extent that they do not breach reasonable consumer expectations. The gap between expectations and the content of EULAs is especially wide when it comes to restrictions on copying and transferring ownership of digital content. In Germany, EULAs are only valid if known to

3450-588: The code and find bugs and loopholes than a corporation would find practicable. According to Richard Stallman, user access to the source code makes deploying free software with undesirable hidden spyware functionality far more difficult than for proprietary software. Some quantitative studies have been done on the subject. In 2006, OpenBSD started the first campaign against the use of binary blobs in kernels . Blobs are usually freely distributable device drivers for hardware from vendors that do not reveal driver source code to users or developers. This restricts

3525-441: The company to maximize revenue. Proprietary software is usually offered under a restrictive license that bans copying and reuse and often limits the purchaser to using the software on one computer. Source code is rarely available. Derivative software works and reverse engineering are usually explicitly prohibited. The issue of reuse is particularly important in the copyright law of English-speaking countries. Many EULAs allow

3600-584: The copyright of derivative works, such as user-generated content in video games. Enforceability of EULAs has been a controversial issue and varies by jurisdiction. In the United States, it is possible to enforce a EULA that is shown to the customer after purchase, but this is not the case in Germany. European Union law only allows for enforcement of EULAs insofar as they do not breach reasonable customer expectations. There have been numerous attempts to make fun of EULAs that are not read, for example by including

3675-399: The court system. Legal scholar Anthony Michael Catton suggests that user-generated content should be considered jointly authored by the video game developers and the users. Some companies do allow video footage of their games to be distributed online, even for profit. Traditionally, software was distributed in the form of binary object code that could not be understood or modified by

3750-556: The customer before purchase. The United Kingdom's National Consumer Council undertook a study published in 2008 which found issues with the way 17 major IT businesses had been using EULA's and asked the Office of Fair Trading to undertake an investigation. As of 2020, the enforceability of EULAs and provisions granting copyright of all derivative works to the developer has not been judicially tested in United Kingdom. Before

3825-423: The freedom to cooperate with whom they choose, and to control the software they use. To summarize this into a remark distinguishing libre (freedom) software from gratis (zero price) software, the Free Software Foundation says: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in ' free speech ', not as in 'free beer ' ". ( See Gratis versus libre . ) In

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3900-412: The goals and messaging are quite dissimilar. According to the Free Software Foundation, "Open source" and its associated campaign mostly focus on the technicalities of the public development model and marketing free software to businesses, while taking the ethical issue of user rights very lightly or even antagonistically. Stallman has also stated that considering the practical advantages of free software

3975-409: The government charged that bundled software was anti-competitive . While some software might always be free, there would henceforth be a growing amount of software produced primarily for sale. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the software industry began using technical measures (such as only distributing binary copies of computer programs ) to prevent computer users from being able to study or adapt

4050-448: The internet is more commonly licensed via clickwrap (where the user clicks to agree to the license) or browsewrap (continuing to browse the website indicates agreement). Most companies prefer to sell licenses rather than copies of the software because it enables them to enforce stricter terms on the end user in a number of domains, especially by prohibiting transfer of ownership or use on multiple computers, and by asserting ownership of

4125-421: The late 1990s, other groups published their own definitions that describe an almost identical set of software. The most notable are Debian Free Software Guidelines published in 1997, and The Open Source Definition , published in 1998. The BSD -based operating systems, such as FreeBSD , OpenBSD , and NetBSD , do not have their own formal definitions of free software. Users of these systems generally find

4200-408: The license agreement. Most assume the terms are unobjectionable or barely notice agreeing while installing the software. Companies take advantage of consumers' inattention to insert provisions into EULAs. Many assert that the purchaser is an adult and takes responsibility for minors' use of the product, to relieve the vendor of the issue of contracting with a minor and liability from minors' use of

4275-416: The mid-1970s and is vested in the company that makes the software, not the employees or contractors who wrote it. The tendency to license proprietary software —to sell the right of use of the software rather than a copy of the software—dates from the time period before the existence, then the scope of software copyright protection was clear . These licenses have continued in use after software copyright

4350-414: The product. EULAs, almost always offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis as a non-negotiable condition for using the software, are very far from the prototypical contract where both parties fully understand the terms and agree of their own free will. Proponents argue that the contracts streamline purchases and that savings for the company could be passed to the consumer. Enterprises buying software for

4425-511: The same set of software to be acceptable, but sometimes see copyleft as restrictive. They generally advocate permissive free software licenses , which allow others to use the software as they wish, without being legally forced to provide the source code. Their view is that this permissive approach is more free. The Kerberos , X11 , and Apache software licenses are substantially similar in intent and implementation. There are thousands of free applications and many operating systems available on

4500-435: The shift in climate surrounding the computer world and its users. In his initial declaration of the project and its purpose, he specifically cited as a motivation his opposition to being asked to agree to non-disclosure agreements and restrictive licenses which prohibited the free sharing of potentially profitable in-development software, a prohibition directly contrary to the traditional hacker ethic . Software development for

4575-461: The software applications as they saw fit. In 1980, copyright law was extended to computer programs. In 1983, Richard Stallman , one of the original authors of the popular Emacs program and a longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , announced the GNU Project , the purpose of which was to produce a completely non-proprietary Unix-compatible operating system, saying that he had become frustrated with

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4650-443: The software themselves or by hiring programmers to modify it for them. Free software often has no warranty, and more importantly, generally does not assign legal liability to anyone. However, warranties are permitted between any two parties upon the condition of the software and its usage. Such an agreement is made separately from the free software license. A report by Standish Group estimates that adoption of free software has caused

4725-514: The software, and this results in reliance on the publisher to provide updates, help, and support. ( See also vendor lock-in and abandonware ). Users often may not reverse engineer , modify, or redistribute proprietary software. Beyond copyright law, contracts and a lack of source code, there can exist additional obstacles keeping users from exercising freedom over a piece of software, such as software patents and digital rights management (more specifically, tivoization ). Free software can be

4800-411: The source and use the same license. This requirement does not extend to other software from the same developer. The claim of incompatibility between commercial companies and free software is also a misunderstanding. There are several large companies, e.g. Red Hat and IBM (IBM acquired RedHat in 2019), which do substantial commercial business in the development of free software. Free software played

4875-412: The user purchases a perpetual license, it is common for EULAs to allow unilateral termination by the vendor for any number of vague reasons or none at all. Furthermore, many EULAs allow the vendor to change the terms at any time and the customer must choose between agreeing or ceasing use of the product, without getting a refund. EULAs are also applicable to in-app purchases and microtransactions . As

4950-436: The user, but could be downloaded and run. The user bought a perpetual license to use a particular version of the software. Software as service (SaaS) vendors—who have the majority market share in application software as of 2023 —rarely offer perpetual licenses. SaaS licenses are usually temporary and charged on a pay-per-usage or subscription basis, although other revenue models such as freemium are also used. Even if

5025-495: The users' freedom effectively to modify the software and distribute modified versions. Also, since the blobs are undocumented and may have bugs , they pose a security risk to any operating system whose kernel includes them. The proclaimed aim of the campaign against blobs is to collect hardware documentation that allows developers to write free software drivers for that hardware, ultimately enabling all free operating systems to become or remain blob-free. The issue of binary blobs in

5100-429: The vendor to collect information about the user and use it in unrestricted ways. Some EULAs restrict the ability of users to exercise copyright over derivative work made using the software, such as creative creations in the virtual worlds of video games . Although most video game EULAs assert that the developer holds the copyright on any user-generated content , this is contested by users and has not been tested in

5175-541: Was a proprietary software licence. However, with version 0.12 in February 1992, he relicensed the project under the GNU General Public License . Much like Unix, Torvalds' kernel attracted the attention of volunteer programmers. FreeBSD and NetBSD (both derived from 386BSD ) were released as free software when the USL v. BSDi lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in 1995. Also in 1995, The Apache HTTP Server , commonly referred to as Apache,

5250-402: Was competing with the hardware manufacturer's bundled software products (free in that the cost was included in the hardware cost), leased machines required software support while providing no revenue for software, and some customers able to better meet their own needs did not want the costs of "free" software bundled with hardware product costs. In United States vs. IBM , filed January 17, 1969,

5325-416: Was recognized in the courts, and are considered to grant the company extra protection compared to copyright law. Virtually all proprietary software is not sold as a copy but rather as a license with associated EULA. Initially, end-user license agreement (EULAs) were printed on either the shrinkwrap packaging encasing the product ( shrink wrap contract ) or a piece of paper. The license often stipulated that

5400-476: Was released under the Apache License 1.0 . All free-software licenses must grant users all the freedoms discussed above. However, unless the applications' licenses are compatible, combining programs by mixing source code or directly linking binaries is problematic, because of license technicalities . Programs indirectly connected together may avoid this problem. The majority of free software falls under

5475-679: Was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust, or adapt, we could." Official statement of the United Space Alliance , which manages the computer systems for the International Space Station (ISS), regarding their May 2013 decision to migrate ISS computer systems from Windows to Linux The economic viability of free software has been recognized by large corporations such as IBM , Red Hat , and Sun Microsystems . Many companies whose core business

5550-407: Was typically public-domain software . Software was commonly shared by individuals who used computers and by hardware manufacturers who welcomed the fact that people were making software that made their hardware useful. Organizations of users and suppliers, for example, SHARE , were formed to facilitate exchange of software. As software was often written in an interpreted language such as BASIC ,

5625-483: Was written by Stuart Cracraft. Having started in 1984 in collaboration with Richard Stallman prior to his founding of the GNU Project , GNU Chess became one of the first parts of GNU. GNU Chess has been enhanced and expanded since. Versions from 2 to 4 were written by John Stanback. Version 5 of GNU Chess was based on the Cobalt chess engine written by Chua Kong-Sian. In 2011, GNU Chess transitioned to version 6, which

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