Fabien's open letter to the community

[Sylwy]

The whole Rybka team and their hardcore supporters must be banned from the the honest circle of the computer ches community....
I'm really glad that I was behind the right side of the fence all this time
Dr.D

Dr.D, maybe the "hardcore supporters" are just good people that like Rybka as a nice tool, regardless of its dubious origin (the tone of your posts reminds me a show satirizing a terrorist: "Infidels, I kill you!"). They can change their mind. This is not a messianic mission with sides to stand.
Why not just try to discuss in a civilized manner and with good arguments?

Regards,

After all these years of lies and unjustified financial benifits I don't think a civilized manners have a place here,not to mention the huge unrespect and ignorance toward the customers and fans of Rybka....The snake's head must be cut off ASAP....
Even is a chess game,if you have the opportunity to stear your opponent to a crumpled position,would you keep a civilized manner in terms of play
Don't think so regards,
Dr.D

Hello Herr Dr. !

Nice or not ?



Au revoir mon ami !

S

[Uri Blass]

VR used Fruit code. Noone who looked at the facts can disagree.

Wrong. Fabien just wrote he disagreed. "Reading" or "re-writing" is not "using" code in the normal meaning of the word.

Maybe everything is rewritten, but that would still be a GPL violation.

Wrong again. Copyrights do not extend to rewrite.

What I wrote many times is: We cannot say if this was a GPL violation or not as long as Fabien doesn't complain.

OK, so you are not only wrong on all counts now, you were wrong many times before. Nice to let us know. If it is a GPL violation follows from examining the Fruit code and the Rybka binary. Fabien's opinion on this is completely irrelevant. Justice in this world is done by facts, not by opinions of people who are considered important or respected. And legal action can only be taken by the FSF, as they own the copyrights, and Fabien is no longer an interested party.

Now he complained, now we know Rybka is illegal.

Only those that cannot understand what they read 'know' this...

I find your prejudice and intellectual dishonesty extremely irritating, please join the Rybka forum.

I do not see intellectual dishonesty by H.G.Muller.
Not everyone who has a different opinion than you is dishonest and I think that I agree with him.

Personally I see no problem with rybka and also no problem with houdini.
I consider both of them as legal.

The post of Fabien did not convince me that rybka is illegal or that strelka
did something against the GPL when we assume for the discussion that strelka does not come with source code(other people may disagree with me about the meaning of the GPL but I am not going to say that they are dishonest).

I also saw no evidence that houdini or ippolit is based on rybka so I do not support Vas in these claims(Vas did not take legal actions against them so I assume that they are innocent)

[AdminX]

VR used Fruit code. Noone who looked at the facts can disagree.

Wrong. Fabien just wrote he disagreed. "Reading" or "re-writing" is not "using" code in the normal meaning of the word.

Maybe everything is rewritten, but that would still be a GPL violation.

Wrong again. Copyrights do not extend to rewrite.

What I wrote many times is: We cannot say if this was a GPL violation or not as long as Fabien doesn't complain.

OK, so you are not only wrong on all counts now, you were wrong many times before. Nice to let us know. If it is a GPL violation follows from examining the Fruit code and the Rybka binary. Fabien's opinion on this is completely irrelevant. Justice in this world is done by facts, not by opinions of people who are considered important or respected. And legal action can only be taken by the FSF, as they own the copyrights, and Fabien is no longer an interested party.

Now he complained, now we know Rybka is illegal.

Only those that cannot understand what they read 'know' this...

I find your prejudice and intellectual dishonesty extremely irritating, please join the Rybka forum.

Personally I see no problem with rybka and also no problem with houdini.
I consider both of them as legal.

The post of Fabien did not convince me that rybka is illegal or that strelka
did something against the GPL when we assume for the discussion that strelka does not come with source code(other people may disagree with me about the meaning of the GPL but I am not going to say that they are dishonest).

I also saw no evidence that houdini or ippolit is based on rybka so I do not support Vas in these claims(Vas did not take legal actions against them so I assume that they are innocent)

+1

[Houdini]

Your unconditional banning of some engines has made real evidence unnecessary.

Only for those who think a list is evidence. But no, the list is consequence.

Felix Kling's post on the Rybka forum demonstrates that for the Rybka Team the rating lists are evidence enough to convince the whole world about the "clones".

Surprisingly enough, long-time rating list members like Graham have complained about Vas remaining completely silent, when in fact you're the people who have provided him the perfect context for doing so.

Robert

[AdminX]

Your unconditional banning of some engines has made real evidence unnecessary.

Only for those who think a list is evidence. But no, the list is consequence.

Felix Kling's post on the Rybka forum demonstrates that for the Rybka Team the rating lists are evidence enough to convince the whole world about the "clones".

Surprisingly enough, long-time rating list members like Graham have complained about Vas remaining completely silent, when in fact you're the people who have provided him the perfect context for doing so.

Robert

Which means all who are posting in the thread link below should be deleted, censored or moved to the flip side/drama llama, including Felix himself.

http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforu ... ?tid=20625

[wims]

Wrong. Fabien just wrote he disagreed. "Reading" or "re-writing" is not "using" code in the normal meaning of the word.

Rewriting is still cloning tho. If you compare decompiled code with original source code you will notice next to none of the same code, yet if you compile it then the resulting executable will have the same features as the original decompiled exe. It is infact the exact same as rewriting the code by hand when it comes to the cloning discussion. Its not important whether or not its a breach of the GPL in this regard

[hgm]

The proof is the author of Fruit himself. "Fabien's open letter to the community". And Vas statement that he claimed that Strelka 2.0 is a clone of Rybka 1.0. This linked Fruit code with Rybka code.

Read it again, then. As many times as it needed to register. He says "legally 'there is no issue". Which means no GPL violation, i.e. no copying of code.

Now I understand of course you take Fabien for an idiot, so that you can ignoe what he writes completely, and just want to use the fact that he says anything at all as a good opprtunity to shoot off your mouth aganst those that you dislike.

But I take Fabien kind of seriously. "No copying of code, but a translation of the algorithm".

So 'poof' goes your 'proof'...

Actually Fabien didn't say that.

Here is what he actually said (emphasis mine):

So legally there was no issue that I knew of.

(and he was talking about Strelka here, not Rybka)

Excellent point Ricardo! Strelka actually complies with the GPL, as Youri released its source code. Besides, Strelka was free. So the problem remains for Rybka.

Actually I thing this is a very poor point. Because he also said:

First there was the Strelka case. Dann approached me with some "Strelka" source code for me to check. I had never heard of it. I assumed it was some closed-source free engine and that people wanted to know whether it was based on the Fruit source code.

So you can highlght the "that I knew off" all you want, but it actually backfires, as he clearly assumed the GPL was NOT complied with, (as it indeed was not, at that time), and nevertheless he saw no violation of it.

So no matter how eager people are for Fabien to say anything else than he did, even to the point where they accuse me of misunderstanding him, the bare fact remains that Fabien states:

Strelka would be a legal derivative of Fruit, even if it had remained closed source.

Now you can disagree with that opinion, and you can even show facts to prove that Fabien is completely wrong about this, or claim that I misunderstood him completely. Or people could start calling me names and could call me a Rybka fanboy just because I point out something they do not like. But none of that alters the fact that this is what Fabian actually wrote.

[Robert Flesher]

The proof is the author of Fruit himself. "Fabien's open letter to the community". And Vas statement that he claimed that Strelka 2.0 is a clone of Rybka 1.0. This linked Fruit code with Rybka code.

Read it again, then. As many times as it needed to register. He says "legally 'there is no issue". Which means no GPL violation, i.e. no copying of code.

Now I understand of course you take Fabien for an idiot, so that you can ignoe what he writes completely, and just want to use the fact that he says anything at all as a good opprtunity to shoot off your mouth aganst those that you dislike.

But I take Fabien kind of seriously. "No copying of code, but a translation of the algorithm".

So 'poof' goes your 'proof'...

Actually Fabien didn't say that.

Here is what he actually said (emphasis mine):

So legally there was no issue that I knew of.

(and he was talking about Strelka here, not Rybka)

Excellent point Ricardo! Strelka actually complies with the GPL, as Youri released its source code. Besides, Strelka was free. So the problem remains for Rybka.

Here I will add another point of law : in most western countries, users DO have the right to decompile a program to understand how it works. But this must remain for personal use. So if Youri discloses the decompiled sources of a closed-sources program into the wild, then he's in contradiction with western computer program users legislations (I have no clue, though, of where Russia stands on this point). But this only concern the Rybka<>Strelka relations, not the Strelka<>Fruit, as Fruit is open sourced.

Here is what Anthony Cozzie had to say about Strelka:

Hello,

I took a look at the Strelka sources (sorry, couldn't contain my curiosity). I do sympathize with your legal issues and hope you can work something out. IIRC disassembly is legal but I can't imagine that releasing source code is. The worst part is that I think it will be very difficult to prevent this in the future. I looked into some of these things and unfortunately obfuscation seems to be theoretically impossible, although at least you can waste some of Osipov's time. However, you can take heart that there isn't really anything your competitors can learn from Strelka anyway

Which is why I'm surprised no one is talking about the actual source code, which by your own admission is very similar to Rybka 1.0. I know a lot of the people here are basically chess players and not programmers, but that no one has taken the time to spend an hour examining the most dominant chess program in 5 years? I expected that Rybka was going to be a fast simple program with an obfuscated node count, but I had no idea just how right that was going to be. On my machine the 32-bit Strelka gets 1.2 million nps or so, which means a 64 bit compile would get 2.5M, or about 5X as fast as my poor little Zappa. In terms of knowledge, there is very little that is not in well known except for the material tables, which should be very fast. I'm also pretty amazed at how aggressively the search prunes. Not only will Strelka drop straight into the q-search on a depth-3 search search, but because it orders all captures first, it will reduce almost all noncapture/check moves.

Anyway, in my professional opinion Strelka is basically Fritz5 + history reductions + bigger (but not more) mobility/passed pawn terms + super-vasik-material evaluation. What's amazing to me is how well it works. I don't know whether to laugh at the silliness of all the speculation surrounding Rybka and how horribly wrong it was, or congratulate you for taking a completely different path than everyone else.

cheers,

anthony

Graham, I hope you understand this was a figurative comparsion and not a factual one. If you do understand this, I am not sure why you posted it?
Please enlighten us.

[Roger Brown]

I've just been honest with Vasik in the Rybka forum....here's what I've just posted there....

Rajlich....you're the biggest crook ever to influence the computer chess community....
The same goes for your hellhounds that keep barking and leaking your feet all these years....
Dr.D

Of course it won't last long and most probably I'll be banned for life but hey....you can always register there with funny accounts like bannedforlife

Hello Doctor,

What you post elsewhere is hardly my business but when you post it here it becomes so. Your statement contains at least one statement of legally unsubstantiated hyperbole.

Please, by all means, retain the passion but ally it with good sense.

Later.

[hgm]

Rewriting is still cloning tho. If you compare decompiled code with original source code you will notice next to none of the same code, yet if you compile it then the resulting executable will have the same features as the original decompiled exe. It is infact the exact same as rewriting the code by hand when it comes to the cloning discussion. Its not important whether or not its a breach of the GPL in this regard

Ah, but copyright laws actually cover that case. It is comparable to 'copying' vynil records to audio tape, or translating an English novel into French. Such cases where there is a simple 1-to-1 correspondence between original and 'copy' are not enough to wrestle it out from under the original copyrights ownership. And if they can be done 'mechanically', without putting in much intellectual effort (like using an mp3 encoder) they don't even earn you 'translaton copyrights' on the copy.

Decompiling / disassembling is NOT consdered re-writing or translating. It is considered equivalent to copying to another medium.

If re-writing should be considered cloning is not a matter of law, but of opinion. Like I stated before, I consider all existing engines clones of Shannon's work. But what good does that insight do me?