[gnugo-devel] Question about a closed-source application based on GNU GO engine

[果核工作室]

Hello GNU Go development team,

  First of all, I thanks to every one of your team and pay my respect to the 
great work done by you.

  I'm a Chinese programmer and developed a free GO program ( a windows GUI 
shell exactly) base on the GPLed GNU GO years ago in my spire time, and now, 
the program was wide spreaded around China. The GUI program is called 
Deerstalking (Zhulu weiqi in chinese, the 'zhulu' which means fight with the 
enimies for get/gain more land of the world), and can be downloaded freely from 
http://guohe.tiaoa.net/download/ds.exe or 
http://guohe.tiaoa.net/download/ds.zip, which need's MS-Windows 2000/XP/Vista 
to install and playing.
  My question is, since I'm going to upgrade the Deerstalking(DS) and make it a 
commercial application, still based on GNU GO (currently GNUGO engine 3.0. 3.2, 
3.4, 3.6 are supported), and the DS is closed source application, does this 
rebels the GUN GPL license?
  Here's more detailed technic information. I made a trivial modification of 
the GNU GO engine to make DS read information from GNU GO engine more easily, 
all the modified source code (two .c files of each version of the engine) are 
attached with the executable engine and deployed along with the DS 
installation. The DS GUI shell communicates with the engine by the GTP(Go Text 
Protocol) via the windows pipe.
   The GNU GO egines are compiled as seperate/stand-alone executables (.EXE 
file), since the engine and the gui shell are running as different process and 
running in different address space, and in my understood of the GPL license, 
they should be consided as "seperate" applications. Because all the modified 
source files of the GNU GO engine by me are opened source, and the DS gui shell 
is a 'seperate' application, so, I THINK the DS gui shell do not affected by 
the GPL license and can be a closed-source application, the entire system do 
not rebel the GPL. Here, I need your confirmation and allowance (to make DS a 
closed-souce code and commercial application).

    And here's my another hope on the GNU GO. The GNU GO has been developed 
about 20 years and is the first-class GO engine in the world, more and more 
people loving it, and more developer/company going to extend the engine or to 
develop commercial apps base on it in different platforms including 
PC/Server/Simbian/iPhone/PDA/RIA(Rich internet application) etc., in some 
evnironment, it's hard or impossible to use GTP/GMP protocol to communicate 
with the GO engine, I hope the GNU GO development team will release the engine 
source code in more open license such as GNU LGPL or even MIT license/BSD 
license in the future, so that the other developers can finish their work more 
easyly and more quickly. 
                                
    Thank you!

    Huang Xinmin

--------------
address@hidden
2009-01-16 (January 16, 2009)