Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Upstream Location: http://chess.samba.org/ Authors: Richard Nash, Dan Papasian, Andrew Tridgell License: GPLv2 (well, almost, see below)
Description: lasker is a free internet chess server, forked from the last free available version of FICS (http://www.freechess.org), who unfortunately decided to close their source. It provides a server for humans or bots to login and play chess. The FICS protocol is supported by most popular chess user interfaces, like xboard and eboard. Currently I am still sorting out some license and security issues. In particular, the CVS source includes "mamer", a bot which runs tournaments. Unfortunately, that code has no license at all (and was not included in the releases). I will try to clarify that and get the authors to release it under a DFSG-compatible license. It would be a great enhancement to lasker. Furthermore, there seem to be (small, could be replaced) files with some variant of the obnoxious BSD advertising clause. As to security, Andrew Tridgell already fixed several buffer overflows and the like, but still has some sort of security disclaimer in the README. I invite other chess-interested maintainers to help me, it will be some work, but I consider it worthwhile, as there is currently no other usable free internet chess server. Lukas