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What is the best chess engine released under permissive free software license? By permissive free software license I mean, that it is legal to incorporate the engine's code into my project without having to release the source code of my whole project.

+1  A: 

GNU-chess works with a number of different front ends, and there are web servers that let you play against it in a web browser. Even though the software is GPL, it seems that you might be able to run it as a separate process and have a closed source front end talk to it. This would require careful investigation to see if it's OK. With GPL you can't incorporate it, you can't link it (that's LGPL), but I think it talks some protocol through pipes which might allow it to run as a server on a local machine. You'd still have to offer source for that piece of the product though.

phkahler
A: 

Have you looked at the Computer Chess Blog. The source code posted there has no license attached to it.

Adam Berent