[ggo-discussion] Re: gGo, OSS, netlag and cheating

At 21:38 09.02.2003 -0800, you wrote:

Thanks for throwing in your opinion. I am interested to hear what other 
people are thinking.


>Frankly, I'm a little troubled by it too.  But I'm more troubled by what
>appears to be a terrible protocol design.  One of the cardinal rules of
>client/server computing is that you can't trust the client.

Fully agreed. But we need to live with what is available.

The feature itself is good. When I look at KGS which lacks time 
compensation, this is since 2 years one of the top ten feature requests 
made by users. However, since noone came up with a good idea how to secure 
the client information, it has not been implemented. And KGS has the 
advantage it has only one client, it is closed source, and a binary 
protocol which is far more difficult to modify than the IGS protocol. Uh, I 
mentioned closed source as advantage, bash me for it, but that is my 
personal opinion when it comes to game clients.


>I run Debian too, Kristof, and I value the tangible and intangible benefits
>of Free software.  But there are few more intractable problems than the
>security of client software in a competitive environment.  Remember the hue
>and cry when id software released the source code for Quake 1?  Cheating
>became pandemic because the barrier to entry for cheaters had been lowered
>considerably.

Exactly this was my problem with open source. It is impossible to prevent 
abuse the IGS protocol, if we just take into consideration the leak exists 
and we cannot change it. Other clients, self-made proxy server etc. are 
alternatives to modifying gGo. However, that is not *my* problem. *My* 
problem is what people talk about *my* client. And open source lowered this 
barrier you mentioned to almost zero. This is exactly the main reason 
behind moving to closed source. The reason is not I dislike open source. I 
use it myself. But as I said in my last mail, I also use closed-source 
software and do not consider closed-source as automatically bad.


>I think the proposal to split gGo into two apps is a good idea, but would
>take an awful amount of time.  Even that wouldn't placate the most vocal
>die-hards though, so Peter would still be in a losing position.

I am somewhat reluctant to invest time and efforts in this. After all, the 
time I can invest in gGo is limited.
And I am also somewhat annoyed about the whole discussion. I don't mean the 
recent mails and posts or any of you particiulary, but the complete topic 
which already started around August last year. As it's impossible to please 
everyones demands, I will - from different points of views - always be in a 
losing position. I don't work on gGo so people grovel in front of me 
worshipping the software all day, but my patience to be in a "losing 
position" (I was looking for this term, darn non-native english speakers) 
is somewhat limited.
Actually, Im not annoyed be the discussion, I am annoyed being in a losing 
position whatever I did during the last months.


>Peter's understandably concerned about his reputation and the future of his
>software, and is trying to make the best of a bad situation.  The solution
>here is fix the core problem, not apply a band-aid that has negative side
>effects.

Nicely said, thanks. But taking into consideration the core problem is not 
likely to be fixed in the near future, I tend to leave things as they are 
at the moment. Read: Free distributed but closed source application.
This might not be liked by everyone, but it seems to be the solution that 
leaves me with the least trouble.

After all, I only offer a piece of software. People can use it. Or not. 
This is their decision, not mine. Different to KGS, the IGS architecture 
allows multiple clients, which is a point I like very much, because users 
have the choice and different clients serve different demands. My goal is 
not to get every Go player to use gGo (then it would be named "Microsoft 
gGo"), my goal is to offer one more alternative to other good clients.
The majority of IGS users does not bother about open source or closed 
source but bother about cheating, which I can understand very much. 
Although I repeat myself: I cannot please everyone. So I try to please the 
majority. And to be very honest, I have absolutely no obligation to please 
anybody.

  Peter

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