Why I stood up for Allie is why I stand up for FF2

[mvanthoor]

I enjoyed reading all of your posts within this thread.

Thanks. I've been hanging around software for quite a long time, both commercial and open source, even if I say so myself. I've encountered some typical problems on both sides: often both sides are polar opposites, and it's holding both back.

Open source software:
- "All commercial software is evil." No, it's not. There's software that an open source community just can NOT write. You know "Content Aware" in Photoshop? A computer scientist and a mathematician got their Ph.D's with that. (And then, it still needed to be implemented.) That button cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and took massive special expertise to develop. You're not going to get this done in open source. You're not getting two Ph.D-level people and a few developers working for 4 years on this for free.

- Often very technical. Just take a look at SCID, Arena, or XBoard. The possibilities are endless. The amount of confusion is, as well. (For a non-computer savvy user that is; computer people can figure it out.)

- Everything must work everywhere. That's a commendable sentiment, but it's almost impossible to get one piece of software to run on 200 distributions with 12 different desktops and 500 different library versions. It can be done with software that is open source, but to write commercial software for Linux is very hard. That is the reason why companies who do so, either write for the two great common denominators (Red Hat Enterprise, and Debian Stable), or they use something like Java so they don't have to write native code.

- Everyone uses the programming language they want. Before you know it, you have 7 runtimes, 12 compilers and 5 interpreters installed, and some programs use a lot of that. People are disinclined to work on projects with such huge learning curves.

- User interfaces aren't always the best. It's improving, but for most programs, it's certainly not on par with something like MacOS. (As much as I dislike Apple with regard to their mindset and company, I *love* OSX's user interface and how it looks.)

- ... I could go on for hours.

Commercial software:
- Often written only for Windows. If you're lucky, there's a Mac version. Linux? Blergh.

- Often written for the default settings. If you have your user interface set to anything but the default scaling, font sizes and colors, you're going to get into problems with dialogs not having the correct size, missing text or controls, or clashing colors. This is improving, but especially programs that have existed for a long time are still having problems with this.

- Draconian stuff like activation rules. "You can only activate this on 1-2 computers.", "If you deactivate the software on a computer, you can never activate it again on that computer." or the worst "You have 3 activation slots. Each installation takes one slot, even on the same computer if you re-install. If you want to reactivate more often, you will have to call our support to clear one or more slots." I'm not buying that shit. IF there is an activation, I only buy the software if:
* I don't mind losing it
* It has an "offline" activation mode, so I can go to the website, get the activation key, and save it on my computer; then I can do an "offline" activation using that key, even if the computer is not online. Examples of software like this are Catpure One and Pianoteq, at the time of writing.
* Everything else, and certainly DRM-ed software or "always online" software are off-limits.

- Where open source software is too technical and assumes a user is computer-savvy, commercial software often assumes the user is a dumb m****. I.e., no power user options. Clear, but cumbersome workflows with massive amounts of dialog screens.

- Not customizable. You work how the writer of the software thinks you should work, and nothing else.

- ... I could go on forever.

Open source software and commercial software can learn a lot from each other.

And, as I stated (somewhere, maybe this thread or one of the other Fritz threads), asking money for packaging open source software is NOT the problem. You can write a piece of software, such as a GUI, or even train a network for an open source engine, and then sell them for however much you like, bundling the (open source) engine with it, without problems... as long as you don't try to state that the open source engine is actually your work.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

If they don't move, they''ll be marginalized/vanish in no time.

They're already dead.

They missed the shift to web-based interfaces completely. chess.com and lichess.org have eaten everyone's lunch there. Playchess still exists, I'm pretty sure you'll find it has a slowly dwindling player count. Even the courses, long one of their cash cows, are having their market eaten away by sites like Chessable. From comments made by Simon Williams etc, the latter also give the authors a substantially better cut. On the mobile side, not to mention macOS, ChessBase basically doesn't exist. They finally have macOS support for a few of their new educational DVDs, but that doesn't do anything about the remainder. I'm always upset why Chessable courses are so much more expensive than ChessBase, but part of the answer may simply be: it's because they can charge that price and ChessBase can't.

ChessBase only has 1 product right now, and that's ChessBase itself. There's no real comparable alternative to it, as the sites don't have the analysis/search capabilities and Scid variants are too complex to use. Note the fact that the sites only have mediocre analysis support may say something about how hard the feature is...or maybe just about how much of the userbase cares or really needs the functionality ChessBase offers. (If you look closely at the Chessable video courses, you'll see the repertoires are being played out in a lichess study. That's GM/IM's using those for repertoire building! Even if they were originally made elsewhere, clearly the functionality is starting to get there.)

Fritz as a product no longer makes sense. It made some sense when you had to buy top engines, when you didn't have internet and wanted to play against someone, or you couldn't run an engine in the browser with reasonable performance, but those days are gone.

Even worse, buying either ChessBase or Fritz *again* makes even less sense, because the product isn't moving forward with meaningful new features. That's why they added subscription services like Premium.

If Fritz as a product was worth buying, ChessBase would have announced Fritz 18 and just bundled Stockfish. The fact that they didn't, did the deceptive marketing and are still doubling down on it, tells you exactly what faith they have in being able to sell their own product on its merits: zero. They fabricated a fake story about it being the nr.1 and were expecting to get away with it, because they have in the past.

ChessBase itself is telling you they don't believe they can reasonably sell you Fritz.

[mvanthoor]

They're already dead.

...

They missed the shift to web-based interfaces completely.
ChessBase itself is telling you they don't believe they can reasonably sell you Fritz.

To some extent I agree with you. The points where I don't are mostly with regard to internet and the cloud: many people are stating that software "has to" move to the cloud and "must" run in the browser. I don't agree. Compared to native software, it's cumbersome and slow.

Software is going in the wrong direction IMHO. Way back when, your application was a window, with a menu where you could find functionality, and a button bar with shortcut buttons. That was it. Easy and simple to find what you needed. Nowadays, applications are built as if they are websites running on a tiny phone screen: buttons everywhere, hamburger menu's galore, ... menu's around the entire application, as if "right click" is not an option nowadays. (Often the ... menu's contain what a right-click would have contained in the past, and the Hamburger Menu would contain what you could normally find in the main menu.) Nowadays, I find those "web-like" applications confusing; not only that, they also take copious amounts of space because of the "modern" use-massive-white-space layouts, not to mention the browser's GUI itself that often takes lots of space.

As you stated yourself: Chessbase does have functionality that is impossible or very hard to duplicate in a web-based environment. Fritz as an engine doesn't make sense anymore, but a good GUI for controlling chess engines does. The Fritz GUI, with all its faults, is still one of the best GUI's out there. Shredder is OK, but much more limited. Arena is usable, but not actively developed for Windows, and thus it still has quite some old bugs. SCID is massively complex. (And has way too many derivatives.)

I don't really need a Chess database research tool, because I'm not a professional. I need something like the Fritz 11 GUI: A user interface to manage engines, connect my DGT board to, to open and search PGN files and replay games; that's about it. The Shredder GUI can do most of it, except for a good search function. PicoChess has implemented communication with a DGT-board, outside of the DGT library (this library only exists on Windows). So the information to run a DGT-board is available.

I now (finally) have my own chess engine, and my next project will be creating a GUI akin to Fritz 11, with DGT-board support, in some modern frameworks like Electron or Angular or whatever.

If all goes well, then in time, I'll have my own chess engine and GUI to use for the rest of my life if I so please. (And the rest of the world can use them too if it should want to.) The GUI would be some way to give something back to the open source community, because I'm really not satisfied with the state of the current chess GUI's. All of them feel clunky, except maybe for Fritz 11 if you like old-style GUI's, or Fritz 17 if you like new-style GUI's (with ribbons).

[Madeleine Birchfield]

Fat Fritz 2 on the other hand is a blatant Stockfish clone, Albert Silver having taken 99.9% of Stockfish's existing codebase and trying to pass it off as his own work. You might as well defend the actions of Robert Houdart and Norman Schmidt for trying to pass off Stockfish 8 as their own work.

And dkappe is now defending the Stockfish clone Fire 8, which has already been determined by cucumber, Alayan, Andrew Grant, et cetera to be a Stockfish clone a few months ago, using the source code of Fire 8 beta that its author Norman Schmidt has given them. He claims that making judgments based on Fire 8's source code (and of Fire 4/Seagull's source code) is of shoddy quality.

[Moderation] There seems to be some doubt about the legality of this engine, so for the time being I have moved the leading posting to the moderation archive.

Can anyone explain what the legal issue is here?

People who have disassembled various Fire versions have found out that it is a clone engine with a minimum amount of modifications.
Fire 8 beta was found to be SF8 with (almost) no modifications (but wasn't released to public) Fire 8 release probably has a few modifications to hide the fact.

Fire 4 is a Gull clone.
Fire 5 and later are SF clones.

Looking at the past claims, they are of pretty shoddy quality, especially the Gull ones. Don’t know if they are clones, but we shouldn’t trust this guy and his clone claims.

[dkappe]

And dkappe is now defending the Stockfish clone Fire 8, which has already been determined by cucumber, Alayan, Andrew Grant, et cetera to be a Stockfish clone a few months ago, using the source code of Fire 8 beta that its author Norman Schmidt has given them. He claims that making judgments based on Fire 8's source code (and of Fire 4/Seagull's source code) is of shoddy quality.

Yes? So? Are The White Rose, Night Nurse, Dark Horse or Toga net all blatant clones of Stockfish? How come they don’t play like one another or SF? (See the SIMEX of a few months ago.)

cucumber, Alayan and Andy have let their heretic hunting glee get the best of them, and not for the first time.

[gonzochess75]

And dkappe is now defending the Stockfish clone Fire 8, which has already been determined by cucumber, Alayan, Andrew Grant, et cetera to be a Stockfish clone a few months ago, using the source code of Fire 8 beta that its author Norman Schmidt has given them. He claims that making judgments based on Fire 8's source code (and of Fire 4/Seagull's source code) is of shoddy quality.

Yes? So? Are The White Rose, Night Nurse, Dark Horse or Toga net all blatant clones of Stockfish? How come they don’t play like one another or SF? (See the SIMEX of a few months ago.)

cucumber, Alayan and Andy have let their heretic hunting glee get the best of them, and not for the first time.

I got to hand it to you dkappe. You're a powerful troll. Based on your behavior here and in the past few bits I consider the word "Allie" coming out of your mouth or typed out by you on a computer to be a slur. Please don't defend her ever again. I don't want her associated with you in any way. I’d much rather associate with Alayan, Andy and others who I still retain respect for.

[dkappe]

I got to hand it to you dkappe. You're a powerful troll. Based on your behavior here and in the past few bits I consider the word "Allie" coming out of your mouth or typed out by you on a computer to be a slur. Please don't defend her ever again. I don't want her associated with you in any way.

Ah, love your argumentum ad hominem. Let me close that I don’t believe Allie is a clone of lc0.

[gonzochess75]

I got to hand it to you dkappe. You're a powerful troll. Based on your behavior here and in the past few bits I consider the word "Allie" coming out of your mouth or typed out by you on a computer to be a slur. Please don't defend her ever again. I don't want her associated with you in any way.

Ah, love your argumentum ad hominem. Let me close that I don’t believe Allie is a clone of lc0.

Thanks once again for showing everyone exactly who and what you are.

[dkappe]

Ah, love your argumentum ad hominem. Let me close that I don’t believe Allie is a clone of lc0.

Thanks once again for showing everyone exactly who and what you are.

Someone who uses Latin to point out logical fallacies?

[gonzochess75]

Ah, love your argumentum ad hominem. Let me close that I don’t believe Allie is a clone of lc0.

Thanks once again for showing everyone exactly who and what you are.

Someone who uses Latin to point out logical fallacies?

You should stand up and be proud to let your clown flag fly.