Peter Berger wrote: ↑Wed Dec 29, 2021 7:19 pm
connor_mcmonigle wrote: ↑Wed Dec 29, 2021 6:26 pm
An excellent analogy. However, in this case, even less effort is required as creating a replica is as easy as copy-pasting... It's really exasperating to watch such low effort clones receive so much attention from these clueless "fans".
But on the other hand: what is it to people to be so angry about it? As without the angry guys these discussions would soon vanish.
I can understand being angry about these authors, but about their fans?
People want to be creative and kind of matter. Downloading latest Stockfish doesn’t give you this feeling. So you might want to have a very cool computer that is faster than that of others, or create your own opening book that is ubercool. Or download some secret engine called Raubfish, or Eman or whatever - that others don’t even know about.
Now if Magnus Carlsen would state that he came across this great engine Raubfish, that is stronger than Stockfish, I could understand how this could make people angry
In the case of engines such as Raubfisch and Eman, which blatantly violate Stockfish's license, many are understandably upset as such violations are incredibly disrespectful to the many Stockfish authors who have effectively donated their time to the Stockfish project. By providing misleading test results (due to poor configuration/statistically insignificant samples) and subsequently incorrectly concluding their superiority, these "fans" are promoting the aforementioned illegal clones. I think you're correct in your understanding that these fans want to feel special/important/creative - as if they're the sole discoverer of some new and mysterious strongest engine. I don't think this behavior is intentionally malicious, though it's certainly irritating and disrespectful to the actual authors. It's not surprising this behavior generates some anger.
More generally, in the case of even legal clones which are intellectually void (amount to some very minor changes), such as
Kayra, it's irritating for engine authors to see such clones receive attention over more original efforts. Making some inconsequential tweaks to a huge open source project and then slapping your name on the result and claiming "your engine" is superior to the original is quite narcissistic. It's especially frustrating for engine developers when people who clearly have zero understanding of statistics and fail to understand the inconsequential nature of the changes start claiming such intellectually void clones are superior to Stockfish.
There exist genuinely interesting and useful Stockfish forks such as Crystal and Sopel's "Fat Titz". In general, anyone should feel free to experiment with Stockfish and create a fork if they wish to provided they're motivated by curiosity or an interest in improving performance on some subdomain (puzzle solving for example). If you're only interested in randomly changing a few search parameters so that you can justify assigning your name to the resulting slightly modified version of Stockfish, then you clearly have the wrong motivations.
macOS Sequoia 16GB-512GB, Windows 11 & Ubuntu ARM64.
or go to my blog 
. So I will not be the last to test his rip-off, even if it could not be illegal without sharing the engine. They give nothing to the chess developers, then I have completely removed all others not GPLv3 compliant engines and all older crosstables and comments. In 2022 finally I'll begin to develop my own GPLv3 SF derivative that also in Ed's Code of Honor it's allowed... His RebelFish is a must 