Fabien's open letter to the community

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Alexander Schmidt
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by Alexander Schmidt »

hgm wrote: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?
We are not talking about law, we are talking about the gpl and license agrements.

If you take the source code of Fruit, change it until every line is changed, the new program is still under gpl protection. Publishing it without sources and GPL license is illegal. Hard to pinch but illegal. Is this so hard to understand? When will you finally accept that?

Reading the Fruit sources, build your own engine with the ideas is fine. Using other common ideas is fine. Copying one single line out of Fruit is violating the gpl.

Your shannon clone case is misplaced. Your way of argument is rude. Noone here ever said that it is illegal to take ideas from GPL'ed code. Thats what you always try to imply. I am really sick of this kind of discussions.
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George Tsavdaris
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Re: ......Any answer to this Mr Wael??

Post by George Tsavdaris »

Roger Brown wrote: By all means proceed on this line without taking time to note the several attempts I have made to ease the tension out of this debate and address those memberes who feel that they should insult those whose opinions differ from theirs.
The tension can't be cooled off. Because the same people will say the same stupid things over and over again killing any kind of logic there is(was) in this forum.

I do not intend to follow anyone's hints or advice about banning a member and, in considering your statement to reveal unfounded things, isn't there a burden of behaviour on your shoulders to elevate those you come in contact with instead of joining them in the mess you seemingly abhor?
No. I have said that to Steve(the previous moderator) also. I will deliberately try to create fuss and throw woods to the fire just in case moderators will see what is happening with some guys.

If you don't see it (i wonder why) then this is not a place for me.

Mr Wael constantly is saying every kind of illogical things about Rybka and Vasik, and constantly trying to degrade and dishonor Rybka or Vasik.
I would have no problem if he just said his opinion based on facts. But the problem is he distorts facts or more commonly he doesn't present any!

And when things are becoming difficult and you push him to the limit(like i did) he starts insulting me for example. Saying twice the same thing. Directly saying it. That i received a free copy of Rybka from Vasik in order to protect Rybka in some way here and say good things. He also told me to go to hell and shut up among other similar things.

So yeah if he escapes once again from this, i will become a similar troll and accuse every day any random member here with unfounded and totally random things like (totally random examples) Graham Banks received a copy of Hiarcs in order to say good things about it here, or john dalhem received some money from SMK in order to protect Shredder and show only good results of it in his tests, etc etc.

Every single day i will do that! It's the exact same things Wael did with me and some other members.

If he is allowed to do that, then i am too. If he escaped 3-4 times with this, i should escape too.

I'm not behaving childishly i'm just trying to bring logic back to this forum. That's why i'm creating this fuss. To make bold his posts in order you, the moderators, to see them and see how illogical and out of charter they are.
After his son's birth they've asked him:
"Is it a boy or girl?"
YES! He replied.....
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hgm
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by hgm »

Alexander Schmidt wrote:We are not talking about law, we are talking about the gpl and license agrements.

If you take the source code of Fruit, change it until every line is changed, the new program is still under gpl protection. Publishing it without sources and GPL license is illegal. Hard to pinch but illegal. Is this so hard to understand? When will you finally accept that?
You don't seem to know and understand much about law / copyrights / GPL. Otherwise you would not talk such nonsense. None of what you say above is even remotely true. So the chances that I will accept it are about as large as that I will accept the Earth is flat...

But I have written often enough now how it works, and won't repeat it again. Take some legal advice, or just go on shouting nonsense to make sure everyone sees how little you understand of these matters, I don't care.It is your choice...
Reading the Fruit sources, build your own engine with the ideas is fine. Using other common ideas is fine. Copying one single line out of Fruit is violating the gpl.

Your shannon clone case is misplaced. Your way of argument is rude. Noone here ever said that it is illegal to take ideas from GPL'ed code. Thats what you always try to imply. I am really sick of this kind of discussions.
bob
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by bob »

Sven Schüle wrote:
Laskos wrote:
Sven Schüle wrote:
Laskos wrote:
Sven Schüle wrote:If B is derived from A, and C is derived from B, then C is also derived from A.

But if B (Strelka) is derived from A (Rybka 1.0) and B is also derived from C (Fruit 2.1) then there is no "is-derived-from" relationship between A and C.

To make it simple, let's use "A --> B" for "B is derived from A".

This is correct:
(A --> B and B --> C) implies (A --> C)


But this is wrong:
(A --> B and C --> B) implies (A --> C)


Therefore your last sentence, if you would have finished it in the way most readers would expect, would be lacking some logical foundation.
That is wrong, I agree:

"But this is wrong:
(A --> B and C --> B) implies (A --> C)
"

Yes. But it has nothing to do with my post.

What I was saying, and Vasik said half of that, Fabien said another half is the correct one:

(A = B and C --> B) implies (C --> A)

I confirmed what was Vasik saying in my post with similarity graph in this thread. In fact this similarity graph probably confirms what Fabien is saying too (Rybka 1.0 is shown closer to Fruit 2.1 than Houdini 1.5 is to Rybka 3).
Your "A = B", intended as "Rybka = Strelka", is clearly wrong. It is a known fact that Strelka was based on both Fruit and Rybka.

http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopi ... 815#347815

Therefore any connection between Fruit and Rybka can't be concluded based on Strelka but needs a _direct_ comparison.

Sven
Vasik claimed Strelka 2.0 sources as his own. My similarity test shows Strelka 1.8 as being identical to Rybka 1.0 within error margins. I don't think the fact that Strelka 1.8 is arguably almost an identical clone of Rybka 1.0 or it is exactly 100% Rybka 1.0 changes something. This is an argument ad absurdum just to defend a preferred soccer team. Take Vasik words that Strelka's code is his as granted.

The real issue is what Fabien is saying, confirms the findings or else, that second half of the of assumptions.

Kai
I gave a link to the statement of the Strelka author where he explained exactly what he did to create Strelka. That tells you that A != B. Yuri Osipov also explained that he did not succeed in creating a compilable codebase by only using disassembled R1 code.

So I have to reject your view of my argument being "an argument ad absurdum just to defend a preferred soccer team".

The same post of Yuri Osipov which I linked to above also contains his statement "[...] I gradually added the parts of code and tables from Rybka. It was easy, because Rybka was made on the same way." I do not say this is wrong, I can only say he cannot know exactly that Rybka was made like this. He thinks so. But he can only know for sure what he did by himself, not what someone else did.

Using Don's similarity test is not valid to prove that two programs are "identical". It was not intended for this purpose, I may assume that you know that. Surely you can show that two programs _behave_ very similar. And in case of Strelka vs. R1 this is no big surprise, since Strelka was explicitly designed for exact that purpose.

My point remains that Strelka can't be used to conclude anything about Fruit-R1 connections.

Sven
Just for the record, to eliminate this specific argument, when Zach, CT, I and others looked at the fruit/rybka1 question, we did _not_ involve Strelka. Strelka was the thing that exposed the issue, but we directly compared fruit to rybka, so the strelka issue could not be raised again...
bob
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by bob »

Dann Corbit wrote:
slobo wrote:
wolfv wrote:Hi Guenther,

Fabien did voice his interest in the issue and also voiced his opinion that Strelka is definitely a Fruit clone. On the other hand we know that Rajlich said that Strelka is actually Rybka. For me that spells that Fabien did issue a straightforward message. Thus Fabien voiced his opinion, the way I read it.
and me too.
I guess that Fabian right now is gathering the facts so that he can make up his mind about what happened. Instead of reading between the lines and deciding what we think he might mean, I suggest that in a few days he will simply tell us his opinion.
I would like to put events into proper time-frame / perspective.

1. Strelka came along.

2. Vas looked at it, claimed it was Rybka and therefore he was going to release the strelka source under his name.

3. He then discovered that even if you take a source from a questionable place, once you modify it, the modifications are _your_ copyright. Since Strelka admittedly had some changes made (improvements according to Vas) he then realized he could not release it as his code as then he would be violating the "author's" copyright. Even though Vas had violated the Fruit GPL.

So he was damned if he did (release the code as his own) or damned if he didn't (someone else was getting credit and his ideas were exposed)...

That's all there was to that little episode.
bob
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by bob »

hgm wrote:
wims wrote:There is no way of knowing wether or not the code has its origin in a decompile or if its a rewrite. Its possible to write code that looks exactly like a decompile.
Indeed. Like it is possible to write code that looks exactly like the original. But it would be a bit stupid to do either of that, as it would be a way to make sure the original copyrights still apply to it. The mechanism by which you actually produce the copy is irrelevant. What is relevant is how much it looks like the original.
If decompiling produces the exact same output as rewriting it then you need to explain why decompiling is cloning while rewriting is not. Both are clearly cloning in my opinion, both are at least derivatives
By 'output' you mean here 'moves it makes', as opposed to the binary output from the compiler? This has been a well-fought battle in the software industry. If I write an operating system that requires exactly the same input as Unix, and gives us the same output on it, would it be a violation of the AT&T copyrights on it? The answer is an unequivocal 'no'. Hence we have Linux...
JUST so long as there is _no_ AT&T sys V unix source included. This has happened a few times in the Linux past, and code was completely rewritten to solve the problem... It is not always clear whether code was written by AT&T or by users, after a long time elapses. But AT&T has a memory like an elephant. :)
bob
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by bob »

hgm wrote:
Robert Flesher wrote:That being, did Rybka illegally/unethically use a GPL program (Fruit), yes, or no? I guess time will tell, but....
Well, from what Fabien writes now (which is similar to other investigations I saw posted on this subject, so I have no reason to disbelief him), it seems that Strelka wold not be illegal, even as closed source. Going on the assumption that Rybka is basically a closed-source Strelka that would make Rybka legal to.

I cannot say anything about 'ethical'. There are as many different kind of 'ethics' as there are persons. This is a subective issue, and what is ethical to some, will always remain unethical to others.
I am not sure how Rybka would be legal in light of the GPL fruit was issued under. I've not seen any source code for Rybka 1 beta, yet I have seen executables, which is a direct violation of the GPL. Strelka is a reverse engineered derivative of fruit. I am not sure what in the hell that means, however. :)
John_F
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Re: ......Any answer to this Mr Wael??

Post by John_F »

I have searched all posts of Vasik in rybkaforum having the words Fruit or Fabien or contacted or contact or email and none of them had an issue about what are you saying.
If my memory serves me correctly, several posters on this forum have said something to the general effect that 'Fabien does not care what Vas did with Rybka 1, so why should anyone else care?'.

Perhaps this is what Doc. D. is (not correctly) remembering?

Sometimes when I see old newspapers I am surprised at how my memory has confused some of the details -- even when I was confident I was remembering correctly.
Last edited by John_F on Tue Jan 25, 2011 11:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.
bob
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by bob »

frcha wrote:Are there instances where GPL violation was successfully persecuted - where the code was not blatantly cut and paste but modified + new ideas injected in?

My take on this is that Vas is clearly dishonest about the origins of his engine - but whether its is legal or not -- its hard to say...

-- This too was the same issue with Ippolit of course - clearly dishonest but not necessarily illegal..
....and the wheel keeps turning...



Which is why I have had no problem testing ippolit , houdini on my machine -- I really don't have a clue whether it is legal or not ..

A rating list can have Rybka H and I with an asterisk next to them
*dubious/disputed origin
Take a hypothetical example. You take the source for the GNU C compiler (before there was a C++ even). You modify it so that it will accept C++ syntax. You modify the optimizer so that it produces better code for newer processors. You sell the executable but do not offer source. Are you in violation of the GPL? Absolutely. If you can show that you rewrote _everything_ so that nothing remains of the original (and no, this is not about a line like i=0; or other such nonsense) then your code is not subject to GPL and all is well. But only if no original GPL code remains. And that does mean "any" by a pretty well-defined concept.
bob
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by bob »

Frank Quisinsky wrote:Hi Bob,

1978 :-)
So many years back ...

If you remember on this time do you have from time to time the feeling ... This was yesterday?

Often I am thinking such things.

The year I started with my first chess computer. A year before I learned at first how to set mate with KQ-K.

A great chess year, also the GMs tourneys of this year.
GM Robert Hübner best time ... do you remember!

Best
Frank
What we are seeing today (and for the past few years) is quite different from "the good old days." I do remember someone trying to smuggle in a mephisto clone into some tournament, having only altered the executable with a debugger to change the identifying output. But today things are a mess, to perhaps understate status quo...

1978 was the year I build my electronic chess board to input/output moves for (at the time) Blitz. I remember K. Spracklen commenting "you have more computer power just inputting moves than I have for my entire program" (I used a z80 for the input/output on the digital board, she used a 6502 at the time for her program if I am remembering correctly. My box was an Imsai (altair 8800 clone but much better made). We were playing chess using a dual CPU univac 1100/20