mcostalba wrote:Don wrote: It makes me wonder even more how a few lines of code like this can be copyrighted, when it's not even a very usable general purpose RNG if it cannot be
Don, it can because is not an one hour effort: it has been troughly tested and verified against standard PRNG metric tools and has been proven to be a good PRNG, is not a casual attempt but a piece of non trivial intelectual property.
So I think is misleading looking at how many lines of code it has. Also an "Hello world" C++ program as more or less the same lines of code but the _effort_ to produce and validate it is completely different.
Are you saying that part of the GPL wording is how much time and effort you spent verifying and thinking about the code? I don't see that anywhere in the GPL.
If I have a piece of code in my program that says:
s.a = 0xf1ea5eed;
but it's not related to random number generation, am I volating GPL? This line of code is in Stockish.
I'm sure the answer is no. But what if the next line just happens to be the same line of code that is in stockfish after the s.a line?
What if I just said, "x = 0xf1ea5eed;" and used different variable names everywhere else?
These are rhetorical questions and I don't expect an answer. But code size must surely be part of the picture. Also, the intellectual effort that went into this was not done by one person - I don't think Heinz van Saanen invented KISS.
So I suppose that I could change a constant and copyright it myself? And who would know how much intellectual effort I put into it? Is it suddenly valid or invalid based on this? I don't think so.
I think you are wrong about the intellectual effort - I think I could write 1000 lines of crap if I wanted to and put a GPL license on it, and it would be perfectly valid (even if nobody cared about it.)
I'm not trying to be confrontational, it just seems to me that there should be some kind of reasonable limits on what you can copyright - especially when you are building strongly on the works of others because shifting 4 numbers does not seem to be something that you should be able to forbid others from doing unless they follow your rules.