[EdwardRF]

I am willing to help bbo to port to other platforms, is there anyone interested? Mail me at edwardrf@xtremax.com

[mrdct]

The platform that I'm keenly interested in seeing some development is Pocket PC or Microsoft Mobile. I accept that a full working version of BBO is far fetched, but how about a LIN file viewer so people can watch replays of vugraph and their own play on PDAs rather than having to fire-up a laptop (which can be quite a hassle on a bus).

From my limited understanding of computer programming, this wouldn't require access to BBO's source code, just an understanding of how a LIN is file is structured which is public domain.

There are several PDA bridge programs around that manage to fit the hand diagram on the screen OK. Omar Sharif's program is an example:

[hrothgar]

Fred has stated on numerous occasions that he doesn't want to see Open Source versions of the BBO client. For what its worth, I agree with you. I'd like to see third party clients able to connect in to the BBO server. With this said and done, I think that we need to respect Fred's wishes on this front...

First and foremost, BBO is Fred's baby... He's given a lot to the world of online bridge. Ethically, I have problems repaying him by going against his expressed wishes.

Equally significant: BBO's management has a variety of options available to detect and block third party clients. None of these options is fool proof, however, BBO can certainly make life very difficult for third party developers. Its important to note that any time that Fred and Uday spend working working to add authentication keys and "blessing" specific clients is time that they aren't spending improving the core code base. Personally, I'd prefer to skip the whole arms race.

Finally, if you're trying to launch a stealth project to develop an Open Source client, you might not want to advertise on the BBO forums...

[mrdct]

hrothgar, on Dec 11 2005, 06:05 PM, said:

Finally, if you're trying to launch a stealth project to develop an Open Source client, you might not want to advertise on the BBO forums...

I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. I am suggesting a LIN file viewer for PDAs. Such a program would have nothing to do with BBO per se and I imagine would be primarily used for viewing vugraph data maintained by Nikos Sarantos.

There are already several 3rd party programs that can deal with LIN files (such as converting them to and from other formats or outputing them to a text-based summary of bidding and play). I don't think writing or publicly advocating a LIN file viewer for PDAs has any relationship whatsoever to the agenda of others to develop clients for other operating systems

[pigpenz]

i could see why he wouldnt want open source.....man could you imagine a hack that allowed you to see all four hands at the same time....maybe it has already happened

[hrothgar]

pigpenz, on Dec 20 2005, 01:18 AM, said:

i could see why he wouldnt want open source.....man could you imagine a hack that allowed you to see all four hands at the same time....maybe it has already happened

Back in the weird old days, someone hacked the OKB client to do exactly that...

I seem to recall that this sort of trick wouldnt work on BBO. The OKB server relayed all 4 hands to the table server which then forwarded three hands to the other players. (this implementation was chosen to distribute the load). I seem to recall Fred mentioning at one point that the BBO server only forwarded one hands worth of information to each table. Then again, my brain seems to be very "creative" these days and I might very well be imagining stuff.

[cherdano]

hrothgar, on Dec 12 2005, 01:05 AM, said:

Fred has stated on numerous occasions that he doesn't want to see Open Source versions of the BBO client. For what its worth, I agree with you. I'd like to see third party clients able to connect in to the BBO server. With this said and done, I think that we need to respect Fred's wishes on this front...

I think it is fair to characterize me as a fan of open source, but as far as BBO goes, I think open source clients might be of questionable gain:

1. I think it is very good for the BBO server that everybody has basically the same consistent interface. This would get lost when people start writing their own clients.

2. Maintaining compatibility when you need to change the protocol is difficult enough when you only have to keep track of your own clients. (And don't claim this would be the problem of the 3rd party developers. Half of the users will complain to BBO not to the author of the client when it stops working.)

3. Remains the question whether it would make sense to have the main client of BBO open sourced. I don't see the gain. The BBO client is 99% about the interface. Interface decisions don't seem to work so well in the typical open source discussion-guided decision making. It seems to work better if all decisions are in the hand of one person, like Fred has done it with BBO so far. So if I were Fred and were as capable of him in working out the user interface, I would see no point in giving these decisions to a group. However, if the decisions remain with Fred, the project would be unlikely to attract competent volunteers, so there would be no point in making it open source in the first place.

Generally speaking, I don't know of a single successful open source bridge project. I am wondering why that is, it is completely different for the game of go.

Arend

[Eul_Bofo]

Quote

I think it is fair to characterize me as a fan of open source, but as far as BBO goes, I think open source clients might be of questionable gain:

1. I think it is very good for the BBO server that everybody has basically the same consistent interface. This would get lost when people start writing their own clients.

What is wrong with a different interface if it provides the same functionnality ?

Quote

2. Maintaining compatibility when you need to change the protocol is difficult enough when you only have to keep track of your own clients. (And don't claim this would be the problem of the 3rd party developers. Half of the users will complain to BBO not to the author of the client when it stops working.)

I think you see this from a very pessimistic point of view. Generally, people needing an alternative interface, like me, work on everything but Window$... and know a bit more about programming than the usual window$ user.

For example, BOINC (a massively parallel network computer grid) propose an open source client, and accepts alternative clients, and there is no such things as "users complaints".

Quote

3. Remains the question whether it would make sense to have the main client of BBO open sourced. I don't see the gain. The BBO client is 99% about the interface. Interface decisions don't seem to work so well in the typical open source discussion-guided decision making. It seems to work better if all decisions are in the hand of one person, like Fred has done it with BBO so far. So if I were Fred and were as capable of him in working out the user interface, I would see no point in giving these decisions to a group. However, if the decisions remain with Fred, the project would be unlikely to attract competent volunteers, so there would be no point in making it open source in the first place.

Again, this is very pessimistic. I personnaly had to hack a window$ copy to be able to play bridge for a long time now. I'm happy NetVuBridge works (quite) fine under wine now, but I sure would have prefered a Linux client. Just give the protocol, people using alternative systems will handle it. If the protocol is correctly designed, this shouldn't be a problem. No such things as "seeing the four hands" bullshit (why do you play bridge ? To be the best, or to PLAY ?).

Your point of view about one/several person taking decisions is quite misplaced : a person can take the decisions, and share the knowledge with others to take care of alternative solutions. As long as one person owns the server... where's the problem ? Who denies the right for Fred to handle all this as he wants ?

Quote

Generally speaking, I don't know of a single successful open source bridge project. I am wondering why that is, it is completely different for the game of go.

Yeah, funny thing ! There are open source clients for online chess, go... and quite a lot of games now, going quite OK, but no bridge project. Well, there is a gnu project of a game server, but I don't know where it is now.

I think BBO gained quite a lot of the "market", and at this point, it should be good to allow ANY user to play, regardless of is operating system.

But it's only my point of view, I know this has been thoroughly discussed, so I'll just take the wine client... at least this is better than bloody window$ !

\bye

Eul_Bofo

PS : please see my other post about fonts problem under Linux

[barmar]

Eul_Bofo, on Dec 29 2005, 11:29 PM, said:

What is wrong with a different interface if it provides the same functionnality ?

How can you ensure this?

For instance, Fred just added a feature to display the score of the last hand next to the running scores. If there were multiple implementations, the others wouldn't have that new functionality until they got around to adding it.

Inconsistencies happen even when multiple implementations are maintained by the same vendor. For instance, OKbridge has three interface implementations: OKwin (a Windows GUI application), OKplus (a portable Java application or applet), and okbridge (the original Unix text UI). They all let you play bridge, but there are some minor differences in capabilities between them.

[Sigi_BC84]

barmar, on Jan 1 2006, 12:17 AM, said:

Eul_Bofo, on Dec 29 2005, 11:29 PM, said:

For instance, Fred just added a feature to display the score of the last hand next to the running scores.  If there were multiple implementations, the others wouldn't have that new functionality until they got around to adding it.

So what? Would this harm the functionality of BBO in any way? No. It would just be that the users of the open source client would miss this feature (for some time).

No, I think missing features are not a problem at all -- after all, using the open source client would not be mandatory, it would be something you choose to do, and mostly the users would be competent users of alternative platforms like Linux (as has been pointed out).

My assumption is that either

• the protocol is crap and that Fred doesn't want other people to find out about this
  
• he just does not want other people to mess with his "baby"

Both reasons would be perfectly legitimate from Fred's perspective.

In a private conversation with Uday [...self-censored part deleted...]

If the server protocol is sound, and good documentation is provided to the community that will develop a new client, I don't think why this should be a problem to the safety of BBO. Fred could even give the binary for the server to the project so they could savely test anything they have made.

Having said that, I do respect Fred's wishes, since he provides a good service for free and is not planning to change that (it being free). However, I think the GUI of BBO leaves much to be desired and that a free project would be easily able to make something a lot better in this regard. After all, there are only two (?) people working on the BBO codebase, one being a professional bridge player with not much time to do programming; they simply don't have the resources to do a rewrite or a new GUI.

IMHO having a Java/SWT client would be optimal. I'm also wondering why there's no good open source bridge server/client around. Probably there are simply not enough juniors who can code to have a reasonable probability that a project would emerge (I would be happy to contribute to such a project, but one would have to get organized and get a group together to get it started).

--Sigi

[hrothgar]

From my perspective, a lot of the reasons to do BBO ports are slipping by the wayside...

Most notably, with the new Apples running on Intel, WINE becomes a lot easier.

[fred]

Sigi_BC84, on Jan 20 2006, 08:34 PM, said:

My assumption is that either

• the protocol is crap and that Fred doesn't want other people to find out about this
  
• he just does not want other people to mess with his "baby"

Both reasons would be perfectly legitimate from Fred's perspective.

There are 2 reasons, but they are different from these 2 reasons.

There is at least one Forums post where I explain the reasons. Sorry, but I am not going to explain this again. If someone wants to look for my explanation, feel free to post a link to the appropriate post.

You seem like a smart guy, but I disagree with a lot of what you say. There are a lot of things about our company and the people who run it that you do not understand and you state some subjective opinions as if they were facts.

I also have my doubts as to whether it was appropriate for you to post the details of a private conversation you had with Uday in a public forum.

Sorry, but I am tired of these discussions and I don't want to spend any more time arguing about this.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[event]

Hello

I'm also searching for the way to run bbo on linux. I've read your descussion and wanted to tell you one remark: "for Linux" not equal to "Open Source" not equal to "Free Software". These are three completely different things.

[Sigi_BC84]

event, on Jan 21 2006, 08:38 AM, said:

I'm also searching for the way to run bbo on linux. I've read your descussion and wanted to tell you one remark: "for Linux" not equal to "Open Source" not equal to "Free Software". These are three completely different things.

I know the difference between "Linux", "Open Source", "free (as in beer)" and "free (as in speech)". Actually I find it quite tiresome to make these distinctions in every single post dealing with the "open/free software" topic, esp. if it's clear from the context what is meant.

Regarding BBO on linux, read this: http://www.df7cb.de/...cts/bbo-cedega/

I'm running VMWare to play on BBO which is the best way IMHO if you've got VMWare (which costs money). Now with the VMWare player, which is free (as in beer), there is actually a way to run BBO inside VMWare without paying -- if you've got a preconfigured VM with WindowsXP and BBO installed.
(I haven't tried out VMWare player yet myself).

--Sigi

[Sigi_BC84]

fred, on Jan 21 2006, 06:28 AM, said:

Sigi_BC84, on Jan 20 2006, 08:34 PM, said:

My assumption is that either...

You seem like a smart guy, but I disagree with a lot of what you say. There are a lot of things about our company and the people who run it that you do not understand and you state some subjective opinions as if they were facts.

I said "assumption", trying to make clear that I don't know the real reasons. Now I'm going to search the forums for finding out more.

I understand that you won't argue anymore about this and I don't want to start a flame war (especially not with you, Fred).

My apologies.

--Sigi

[Sigi_BC84]

fred, on Jan 21 2006, 06:28 AM, said:

There are 2 reasons, but they are different from these 2 reasons.

There is at least one Forums post where I explain the reasons. Sorry, but I am not going to explain this again. If someone wants to look for my explanation, feel free to post a link to the appropriate post.

This is the topic that Fred had in mind (probably):

http://forums.bridge...showtopic=11517

I don't think there is any further need for discussion here. Fred makes some perfectly good points (I disagree in some details). In a way the second of my earlier assumptions (he doesn't want people to mess with the software) holds true -- I should have been more specific about this point, however. The entire business side of the issue is obvious and I don't have a problem with that. I think it's great that Fred earns good money and reputation with a free service. I also completely believe him when he says that one of his major motivations is his love of bridge and his enjoyment writing bridge software.

The only thing that remains to be said (and it's actually a reiteration of something I said earlier): If there ever comes the time for a full rewrite of the software (a bad move from a business perspective BTW), by all means use Java.

--Sigi

[barmar]

hrothgar, on Jan 20 2006, 04:32 PM, said:

From my perspective, a lot of the reasons to do BBO ports are slipping by the wayside...

Most notably, with the new Apples running on Intel, WINE becomes a lot easier.

Except that WINE doesn't yet run on the Intel Macs. Folks are working on it, but it's not a slam dunk.

[akhare]

Sigi_BC84, on Jan 21 2006, 11:24 PM, said:

If there ever comes the time for a full rewrite of the software (a bad move from a business perspective BTW), by all means use Java.

Terrible nerd pun: That AWT to SWING some people ...

Atul

[Sigi_BC84]

akhare, on Jan 23 2006, 08:58 PM, said:

Sigi_BC84, on Jan 21 2006, 11:24 PM, said:

If there ever comes the time for a full rewrite of the software (a bad move from a business perspective BTW), by all means use Java.

Terrible nerd pun: That AWT to SWING some people ...

Atul

OMG Atul, please get some professional help :-).

--Sigi