Did all top commercial engines around 2005 violate Fruit 2.1's GPL license?

[towforce]

...And then, somebody decompiled Rybka, and everybody could see his secrets. Since it was never discovered who the culprit were, Rybka's ideas were diffused and incorporated in all modern engines.

Strange things were happening at the time: Vas's behaviour was odd in general(IMO), he was looking for reasons why people should use his hosted chess system, it was very uncommon for commercial chess engines to be decompiled, he was under a lot of attack and maybe wanted to deflect some of that, and presumably the version of Rybka that was decompiled didn't have much copied code in it. Of course I have absolutely no evidence, but at the time I wondered whether Vas had released that decompilation himself.

[peter]

Already, peter has given evidence on this thread sourced from the chessprogramming wiki that one of the engines above, List which was renamed first to Loop List and eventually just to Loop, did end up containing Fruit 2.1 code and thus violating Fruit's GPL license.

To be fully clear about what I gave and what's to be read in linked articles, it's all still just ICGA's (and Mark Watkins') point of view. As far as I know, Dr. Fritz Reul didn't respond to ICGA afterwards neither, did he?

Item was discussed here in 2015 too and David Levy's statement quoted:

http://www.talkchess.com/forum3/viewtop ... 50#p622550

[chrisw]

However, why wasn't any of the other top commercial engines at the time, such as the ones listed in the interview, Fritz, Hiarcs, Zappa, Spike, List, investigated as well for their possible violation of Fruit's GPL?

List was.
From here:
https://www.chessprogramming.org/List_(Program)

List participated at the WCCC 2003 in Graz, not represented by its author himself, but by Erdogan Günes. Fritz Reul, being circumvented with examination commitments, did not act appropriate to prove his program was not a clone, as accused due to an official protest during the tournament. As a consequence, List was disqualified after eight of eleven rounds [6] [7]. In 2005, Fritz Reul was rehabilitated by the ICGA, after List's source code was inspected by an expert approved by the ICGA [8], who stated List was definitely not a clone of any other program, and that it contains some new ideas in chess programming [9] [10].

List-Loop affair is yet another example of the corrupt ICGA of that time, involving, this time ICGA long time board member and officer and ex-computer chess programmer, computer chess expert, ICGA TD and arbiter Jaap van den Herik.

Loop-List or whatever it was called at the time was subject of a cloning complaint and author Reul got banned by ICGA around 2005 or so.

Loop-List was also the source code base for a phd project by Reul, supervised by expert Jaap van den Herik.

Japanese publisher Nintendo approached ICGA/van den Herik asking for advice on a suitable chess engine for this Wii console.

Van den Herik then proposed Reul engine List-Loop and “set up” the contract with Nintendo. It’s usual btw to get a commission or split of the money in these sorts of commercial arrangements.

First problem/conflict of interest that arises here is that ICGA is an association with members. It’s officers are also commercially minded with their own self-interest. If Nintendo contacted ICGA because of brand name of ICGA then payments would be expected to benefit the association/members rather than an individual “officer”. Compare/contrast with a sales/purchase request arriving at a commercial company. Does the company benefit, or does the employee who answers the call?

Contemporaneously, serendipitously, ICGA rehabilitates Reul.

Second problem/conflict of interest.
Time passes. Complaints about Reul/Loop/List rumble on in the background. ICGA delays and avoids over several years (ask Ed Schroeder for details).
Eventually ICGA asks Watkins to take a look.Watkins comes back with a preliminary report that Loop-List is similar to Fruit. Go look up the detail if you want. ICGA delays more (again ask Ed). ICGA asks Reul for a response. Reul is uncontactable (I believe). ICGA eventually state they are not going to investigate further but they are going to sanction Reul (with a ban I think) for not responding to them. Nice get out. Reul’s program published via ICGA/van den Herik, by Nintendo, is only ever subject to a preliminary enquiry, never to be finally completed, and with no “official” status of being any form of copy. Reul is only guilty of “not replying to ICGA”. Compare and contrast case Rybka.
I rather doubt Fabian Letouzey has ever or will ever benefit from the funds presumably transferred from Nintendo in relation to the Wii publishing deal.

[mclane]

ICCA/ICGA was always about deals and making money.
Normally Levy was the bad guy who made the deals or bancrupt companies.

2 deals i remember:
https://www.theregister.com/2013/10/24/ ... ld/?page=1

https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/05/ ... m_ace2018/


I am sure there are more obscure „actions“ …

[matejst]

Madeleine, I have no wish to argue with you. I presented the facts as I remember them, to help you have a global vision when reading the CCC archives. I did not realize that you are a troll.

[Madeleine Birchfield]

Madeleine, I have no wish to argue with you. I presented the facts as I remember them, to help you have a global vision when reading the CCC archives. I did not realize that you are a troll.

Sorry, I was in a really terrible mood yesterday and earlier today after reading the Vas interview and the List Loop cloning accusations, and my mind wasn't all that clear, and this past two weeks as well due to the Albert Silver/Fat Fritz and Stockfish 14 using Leela data controversey. My Vas thread started as a response to an Albert Silver thread by smatovic, and I didn't imagine the thread to become what it did become. All this stuff regarding copying code back in the day, as well as the Houdini/Fire accusations just seems too similar to each other.

At second glance, Vas's intrrview is fairly innoculous, he said he took 'things', not 'code', so it is very ambiguous, just like everything else back then. It seems that the Loop List controversey was all IGCA again, and most accusations of clones back in the time period was handled by the IGCA, which most people on here seem to indicate is an unreliable source due to the ICGA corruption.

I'm getting tired of arguing over possible clones as well, as it seems to be a frequent, recurring phenomenon in the computer chess community that would occur no matter what I do, and the past two weeks has been taxing for me mentally and emotionally. ​Perhaps Daniel Shawul was right, and I should take a break from posting.

[Madeleine Birchfield]

All right, conversation done, the mods could lock this thread up.

[hgm]

[Moderation] Thread locked at request of OP