Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

[AndrewGrant]

You do understand that those pages were only updated AFTER getting legal notice from Stockfish, right? The explicit mentioning of Stockfish's GPLv3 is an attempt to remedy the violation. You know full and well the original page made no direct associations between Stockfish and FF2.

An attempt to placate the Stockfish team, no doubt. But probably not an attempt to remedy an alleged violation which has not been heard in court yet. I hope that court case comes soon so that everyone has clarity from the legal standpoint.

The violation can be asserted -- by Chessbase's own admission -- for at least some of their products.

[Modern Times]

The violation can be asserted -- by Chessbase's own admission -- for at least some of their products.

Where is the admission ?

If you are referring to removing Houdini from sale - my option is that that is an admission of nothing, just a pragmatic response. Removing something from sale that probably is no longer selling anyway, doesn't hurt them at all and removes it from the equation while admitting nothing. Have you got something in writing of their "own admission". You are assuming it is an admission of something and it probably isn't. I think Chessbase are certainly trying to avoid the expense and time and effort of a court case. It was an easy win for Chessbase to remove Houdini, doesn't hurt them in the slightest. And the latest changes to the description of Fat Fritz 2 to more prominently mention Stockfish are also an attempt to avoid the court case whilst still being able to offer it for sale. Will it sell less now that Stockfish is more clearly mentioned ? I don't know. But you are also buying the GUI, cloud analysis, 6 months of playchess, and much more. Still an attractive package for many people who don't want just an engine.

[AndrewGrant]

The violation can be asserted -- by Chessbase's own admission -- for at least some of their products.

Where is the admission ?

If you are referring to removing Houdini from sale - my option is that that is an admission of nothing, just a pragmatic response. Removing something from sale that probably is no longer selling anyway, doesn't hurt them at all and removes it from the equation while admitting nothing. Have you got something in writing of their "own admission". You are assuming it is an admission of something and it probably isn't. I think Chessbase are certainly trying to avoid the expense and time and effort of a court case. It was an easy win for Chessbase to remove Houdini, doesn't hurt them in the slightest. And the latest changes to the description of Fat Fritz 2 to more prominently mention Stockfish are also an attempt to avoid the court case whilst still being able to offer it for sale. Will it sell less now that Stockfish is more clearly mentioned ? I don't know. But you are also buying the GUI, cloud analysis, 6 months of playchess, and much more. Still an attractive package for many people who don't want just an engine.

I already posted this earlier in the thread, and thats why I said "goal posts moved" when you dismissed it. I suppose you just did not read it:

Dem Titel Fat Fritz 2.0 (DVD) liegen leider nicht die vollständigen GPL3-Lizenzbedingungen bei. Aus diesem Grund sind wir gezwungen, den Titel zurückzurufen und den Verkauf der DVD-Version zu stoppen. Bitte beenden Sie den Verkauf der DVD-Version am Mittwoch, den 31. März 2021. Fat Fritz 2.0 (DVD) darf ab dem 31. März 2021 nicht weiter verkauft werden.

[Modern Times]

Yes, well they acknowledged that long ago and long before the lawsuit when they altered the online purchase very quickly to separate out the net from the executable. Much harder of course to alter a physical product. There is stock of that out with resellers whereas there is no stock of the online purchase. It was stupid of them to combine the net and the executable.

[RubiChess]

In case you didn’t notice: https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/ou ... chessbase/

Even though we had our first successes, leading to a recall of the Fat Fritz 2 DVD and the termination of the sales of Houdini 6, we were unable to finalize our dispute out of court.

Can the SF team, or the "team of maintainers and developers of Stockfish", elaborate on what this means?

The Stockfish maintainers have (to my knowledge) never posted informations about the lawsuit in talkchess and will probably be wise and serious enough to never do that in the future.

[AlexChess]

Since it's impossible to reach Stockfish 14 (+100 ELO over commercials Dragon 2.0 and Fat Fritz 2.0, +200 ELO over Ethereal 13 NNUE) the only way to survive for Chessbase is to include Powerbooks 2022 & up to 7-man online tablebases on Fritz 18 if they want to sell their 20 years old GUI for 99€, not only the SF modified source code! How is possible that they cannot hire a top level developers team to create their own engine instead of simply rename "Fritz" the work of others???

My Superblitz between all the best engines:
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-a ... e-fritz-17

Regards, AlexChess

You assume customers care only about elo.
It is possible to sell a new engine because it has some other relative advantages.

For example faster in finding mates relative to stockfish and relative to all other engines based on analysis of many winning positions
or can tell users if there is a forced draw for one side that is something I would like to have in an engine (0.00 evaluation is not equivalent to a forced draw).

Another option is being best in getting points against weak engines with some big handicap that is again something that is possible to test and maybe it is possible to have some engine that is 200 elo better than other engines when it start without queen d1(of course no possible points against strong engines but possible points maybe against tscp or weaker engines).

For that there are programs like SparkChess (perfect for 99% of chess players) . But a lot of people here, that like me are interested in engines matches, are looking only for the strongest ones

The question if there are tests that are not chess games when sparkChess is the strongest.

I would like to see the distance to mate against part of the army and the question is what is the best engine to do it and if some commercial engine can be signoificantly faster than what we have today based on tests with many positions.

examples:

[d]4k3/ppp3pp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQ - 0 1 bm 1.e4 mate in 8

[d]4k3/pppp2pp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQ - 0 1 bm 1.e4 mate in 9(do not know if there are more solutions but it is one of the solutions).

Edit:I do not know if sparkchess is better than stockfish10 in finding the shortest mate(not sure what is the best version of stockfish for finding mates but it is certainly not stockfish14)
I also do not know if there is a commercial program that is simply better than every free program in finding mates
but I see no reason to pay for something that is 50 elo weaker than stockfish and I think that people may prefer even to pay for something that is 500 elo weaker than stockfish if it is proved to be at least twice faster than all the other programs in finding mates based on tests.

I understand what you are saying, and I agree . Also Stockfish 14 isn't perfect and could be improved in most areas (it is the reason that I'm testing also the derivatives Corchess for long time analysis and ShashChess that applies Alexander Shashin theory) One engine could be optimized to match human style, adapting his strength to the player level, another to deeply understand impossible positions (eg: a lot of plus material and no way to win...)

Regards, AlexChess
My Superblitz between all the best engines:
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-a ... e-fritz-17

[pohl4711]

Strange. On the Chessbase-website, FF2 (SE) is still for sale.

https://shop.chessbase.com/en/products/fat_fritz_2

What means "SE"? Stockfish Edition? Dont know.
Interesting is: On the english version of the website, you find this about FF2:
"trained by Albert Silver with the original Fat Fritz, while learning from the surgical precision of Stockfish’s legendary search."
But this sentence is missing on the german website of Chessbase (absolutely no hint, that Stockfish was used, there)

[AlexChess]

Andy,

you don’t do yourself any favors by using such hyperbolic language and making personal insults. Before you go on another rant about the racist sales practices of ChessBase, let’s just let it go.

@dkappe I want to thank you for Night Nurse CF, Dark Horse CF, Toga III and the strong FREE nets like Dark Rose compatible also with Stockfish derivatives.

Sharing, FREE, and Open Source are the three magical words that have changed computer chess engines market forever.

I'm also grateful to all authors that are sharing their knowledge with the chess community, modifing SF source (but please, release the modified source code as GPL.v3 imposes and so we can also compile them for Mac x86 & M1, Windows & Linux ARM64, Raspberry PI4 and Android ) and I thank even more the authors of NOT-SF derivatives, like Rubichess, Minic, Igel, Fire 8 NNUE , Zahak, Nemorino, Seer, Marvin, Greko, Berserk, Gogobello that are improving their engine really fast! I have added a lot of them to my SuperBlitz on next update because they deserve my attention

My Superblitz between all the best engines:
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-a ... e-fritz-17

Regards, AlexChess

[AdminX]

I see there is now a write on this subject at chess.com

https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfi ... -violation

[Harvey Williamson]

I have split off the rest of this thread to Engine origins so if you don't want to stay on topic please go there.
Thanks