M ANSARI wrote:....
...a person decided to go into chess programming full time.
It is pointless to argue about what is obviously a cloned Rybka because one side will always ask for 100% proof which would require that Vas provide his full sources for review. It is done with tongue in cheek because they know it is not in Vas's interest to divulge what gives him a competitive advantage in what is his full time job, just to satisfy some people. Even then I am sure they would come up with something silly.
It seems that Vas is dealing with this the proper way by just ignoring it and trying to make things more difficult for such theft next time.
I dont really know that we are talking about?,
according to what Tiger says, that he says about revising the code is not necessary, in fact, would be a complete invasion of privacy of a program, nor should not be allowed for prosecutions, because possible leaks.
I think wrote:...rybka 1, was based on fruit and others and a free license for proprietary software ... nobody saw this code...
tiger wrote:In a post buried in the middle of the discussions about the possibility that Rybka 1.0 is a derivative work of Fruit 2.1, Chris Whittington has criticized the work done by the reverse-engineerer, claiming that he is just an "artist" inventing variable names and the like. I assume this was supposed to tear down any attempt to compare the source code of program A (say Fruit 2.1) with the disassembly of program B (say Rybka 1.0). The word "artist" is probably supposed to reduce the scientific credibility of the process.
Chris Whittington speaks with authority of what the courts would do, but unfortunately he has not done his homework. He does not know how the courts work through such cases.
The courts do not have to compare the source codes. Which means that a copyright or GPL infringement can be detected even if no source code, neither from program A or program B, is actually available. Only the object codes (the "executables") are really required.
The goal of the analysis conducted by the courts in order to determine if one program is a derivative work of the other is to find out if the ideas used by a program (which are not protectable) are expressed in the same way in both. What is protected, ultimately, is the "expression" of the ideas.
To achieve this, the courts compare the semantics of both programs in order to determine if the ideas and algorithms have been expressed in the same way. The data structures are also taken into account in the process.
The semantics of a program can be expressed in a number of ways. With logical graphs, in plain english or in pseudocode for example.
But in order to compare the semantics of two programs, an effective way can be... to disassemble one and reconstruct its source code with the goal of making it as similar as possible to the source code of the other program without touching the semantics.
There are a number of consequences of this process:
- variable and function names have absolutely no importance
- comments, blank lines, spaces... have no importance
- the order of the instructions can be changed as long as the program is semantically untouched
- even the programming language has no importance!
So the process of disassembling a program and reconstructing the source code so it is as close as possible to the source code of another program is a perfectly valid process and it is actually used by the legal system.
And something that has not really been discussed so far: the data structures used by a program are placed at the same level than the semantics. The similarity of data structures can contribute to evaluate the similarity of two programs.
// Christophe
[/quote]
In view of these words, NOW, I see is a lot of "comments" and programmers with much curiosity, demanding to see codes, test site and etc.. as if they were the divine inquisition...
simply because it interests them as key evidence, and perhaps with intentions of "catching" some ideas ... and then apply them differently.
is very naive to think that a programmer does not know to take advantage of improvements made by another developer in the same program ... even if they think that is a clone...¡
anything else, are like gossip.
feline regards.
PD: and some say they may be based on some code of another program*engine, such NAUM ... as they say that shares many characteristics and limitations...
