YICS Isn't a Chess Server

Yahoo! has introduced a CAPTCHA test for access to their Games services. As YICS is a text-mode program, there is no way to reliably present the challenge to the user.

This project is therefore temporarily defunct. If a workable solution emerges it will be applied, but I haven't the time to solve this issue right now.

Thanks to all of my loyal users and contributors. We'll be back someday.

-- crazycomputers

It has come to my attention that several people are violating the GNU General Public License with respect to the YICS and Y to ICS codebases. These people are usually not United States citizens and have little available contact information, making it difficult to inform them of the violation.

When I find such sites I will list them here along with a detailed explanation of the offenses against the GPL and my copyright.

It should be noted that according to section 4 of the GPL: "You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance." These parties are not in full compliance and their rights under the GPL are therefore automatically revoked, and they may not distribute YICS or Y to ICS in any form. If these parties come to me and demonstrate that they wish to become compliant again I will reconsider licensing the software to them again.

If you have any information on how to contact these parties please drop me a line at <cdhowie at nerdshack dot com> and mention "YICS" in the subject.

If you obtained one of the following derivative works then you are free to redistribute and modify that derivative work as if it were licensed under the GPL, according to section 6. However you must bring the derivative work back into GPL compliance before you may redistribute either a verbatim or modified derivative work.

• http://www.members.cox.net/zozur/ serving YaY-0.0.5.beta.rar.
  1. In violation of section 3 of the GPL; source code is provided, but the GPL states that "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it." The distribution includes a Perl script, "YaY-0.0.5.beta.pl", that is BASE-64 encoded and self-decoding. While it is trivial to revert the script to its original form, the distribution is in violation of the GPL because of this attempted obfuscation. The de-obfuscated version is undeniably a derivative work of Y to ICS.
  2. In violation of section 2a of the GPL: "You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change." There is no such notice in the file "YaY-0.0.5.beta.pl", either the verbatim or de-obfuscated version.