hgm wrote:You don't seem to understand how different the alleged cases of Ippolit vs Rybka 3 and Rybka vs Fruit are. You talk about them as if they are exactly the same. While they are in fact vastly different:
Fruit was an open-source project. The code and ideas were made public by the author, and everyone was free to take and use them. If Rybka was based on Fruit, this was totally legal. Its author was known and addressble.
Ippolit, on the other hand, seems to be a decompiled code that comes from nowhere, published by 'authors' that do not want to divulge their true identity. If it was derived from a decompiled Rybka, that would make it totally illegal. Any work based on Ippolit would be based on _stolen_ code.
H.G. Muller wrote:
" If it was derived from a decompiled Rybka, that would make it totally illegal"
Lets disprove Mullers's thesis:
http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise25.html
http://www.shell-storm.org/papers/files/454.pdf (starting p. 1607)
http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi
http://lwn.net/Articles/134642/
Here are some comments from Vasik Rajlich:
Subject: Re: Do we really want it?
From: Vasik Rajlich
Message Number: 384927
Date: August 29, 2004 at 09:00:04
[...]
Gerd,
disassembling for purposes of finding information is legal and cannot be prevented.
It would be legal (though incredibly hard) for someone to disassemble one of the commercial programs and publish his findings.
Vas
Subject: Re: Questions about disassembling
From: Vasik Rajlich
Message Number: 487295
Date: February 17, 2006 at 04:17:38
On February 17, 2006 at 02:33:32, Jouni Uski wrote:
[...]
>Is it possible to disassemble exe-file, which is zipped and/or copy protected like Fruit 2.2.1? Where are disassemblers downloadable?
[...]
IDA Pro is easily the best. Technically it is not legal (although even this is not quite that simple, there have been a number of court
cases, etc), in practice in computer chess you can do it.
Just a general comment though: it is _extremely_ hard to figure out the innovations in a program. Basically, I would say that in practice
it is impossible. Yes, you can locate the move generator, because you already know what that looks like and what it does. But
understanding the evaluation terms, or adjustments to search depth, would require an ungodly effort, especially for a complex
program. Let me put it like this: every aspiring computer chess programmer has been very strongly tempted to try his hand at
disassembling. When I started computer chess, Shredder was the king. We all wanted to know what he was doing. And nobody found
out. Not Chrily Donninger. Not Frans Morsch. And not any of the then-amateurs.
You'll find some people posting here for example about what they "found" in Rybka. So far it has always just been transparent guessing
based on program behavior, with the disassembly argument used to make it seem legit.
Vas
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
