Fabien's open letter to the community

[Albert Silver]

Well, it looks like I am going to have to delete Rybka 3 and Rybka 4 from my computer. I am not being facetious either.

On principle I have stayed away from the Ipps and Houdini and now to stay principled I am not going to be able to continue using Rybka.

Makes me sad, but that is the way it is.

(it actually makes me a little angry as well since I paid for Rybka...I wonder if I can get my money back?)

I don't agree. Even in a worst case scenario, where there is incontrovertible proof of wrong-doing, the buyer who acted in good faith is never legally or ethically liable.

Suppose, for example, that Intel is proven today to have ignored patents owned by some guy on key components in the CPU you have in your machine. Is your only ethically correct course to remove the CPU and toss it out the window? Of course not. The guy (in this hypothetical situation) can sue and get his due and that is that. Whatever money you the buyer spent that went to the wrong person would be redirected via the legal system. This burden of responsibility assuredly does not fall upon the buyer.

Well a CPU is a much more high dollar investment and therefore it is rarer for things to get THAT far because of all the money involved.

You should read the tech news more often. It happens ALL the time and still does. Microsoft, Intel, nVidia, and others are constantly being sued for exactly these reasons and have been found guilty and forced to pay up.

Here is the latest:

Google accused of using stolen Oracle code in Android

[hgm]

Sylwy,

you should not laugh at him. Perhaps he suffers from dyslexia and in this case we shouldn´t expose him to ridicule because of it.

The clowning of you two guys always reminds me of that Bee Gees song, "I started a joke" ...

And if you have _ever_ thought that someone could write a 3000+ program from scratch, without using every scrap of prior knowledge in the field... Well, what can I say. (That would not violate the charter, that is...) Put perhaps you still do. After all, there is Ivanhoe, Houdini, Robbolito... The living evidence that no knowledge or experience is needed at all, that top Chess programs just fall from trees, as it were...

[Matthias Gemuh]

My good friend Fabien Letouzey, author of Fruit, asked me to post the following message for him:

Is there a particular reason for Fabien not posting this message himself?
The best advice for Fabien would be to settle this matter directly with Vas Rajlich, chess forums are hardly the right place to resolve this kind of issue.

Robert

Are you saying instead of requesting information from the chess community, he should have requested it from Vas ?

[hgm]

HGM, I think that you are saying that the fact that there is identical code in Fruit and Strelka does not prove that there is identical code in Fruit and Rybka. If I have understood you correctly, then the post below deals with that problem. Vas says that there is much identical code in Strelka and Rybka, so much in fact that he is claiming Strelka as his own property. If I have not understood you correctly, would you please explain what you mean.

I did not say anything about this. What I noted is that Fabien judges Strelka not to be a copyrights violation ("no legal case"), which obviously means there is is no identical code (because that would be a copyright violation).

Where did you get the idea that I had said anything about the hypothetical case that there would be identical code?

[hgm]

Apparently you can't read. His comments are pretty succinct IMHO. See the sentence about identical procedure names, etc...

The problem is that this is not very conclusive. If Strelka is a reverse engineered Rybka, (as has been claimed, of course I have no first-hand info on this), the procedure names in it are likely to be made up by the one who did the reverse engineering. (It would be monumentallly stupid to release the binary of a closed-source program without first stripping off the symbol table and relocation bits, and it is hard for me to believe Vas would have done such a thing. Especially if he would have thought he had something to hide...)

What is very likely is that the Fruit has been a big help in reverse engineering Rybka, if the two are so much alike. And that the one doing the reverse engineering made life easier for himself by assigning all the familiar Fruit names to the routines he dug up. That s at least how I would do it...

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Robert,

Marco Costalba wrote in our interview that the ideas in chess programming are well known. Very logical for myself. No reason to discuss in secret mission about it.

Furthermore, here are a lot of persons which wrote computer chess history with open sources and other works. Most interesting ideas in developing of engines comes, after all my knowledge, not from the group of commercial programmers. Again, I don't see any reason to discuss about it in secret mission.

But you have right with the point ... why Fabian haven't interest to disucss the important points here in TalkChess. This could be interesting.

An reaction of Vas isn't very interesting because he had in the past enough time to do that and forget it for some reasons. I think we don't need Vas to make the important points more clear.

Best
Frank

[Eelco de Groot]

Sylwy,

you should not laugh at him. Perhaps he suffers from dyslexia and in this case we shouldn´t expose him to ridicule because of it.

The clowning of you two guys always reminds me of that Bee Gees song, "I started a joke" ...

And if you have _ever_ thought that someone could write a 3000+ program from scratch, without using every scrap of prior knowledge in the field... Well, what can I say. (That would not violate the charter, that is...) Put perhaps you still do. After all, there is Ivanhoe, Houdini, Robbolito... The living evidence that no knowledge or experience is needed at all, that top Chess programs just fall from trees, as it were...

Fair enough Harm. But that also means there is very little means for Vas himself to protect his copyright against rewriting, even if he had never taken a look at Crafty's sources or Fruit sources. That is what Vas has stated himself, and why he just seems to shrug it all off as not pertinent to his business. Neither has Fabien much ground for any claim of infringement of his own copyright, even if he had never tried to protect it by means of the GPL. As I understood it Fabien actually relinquished all his rights to Fruit anyway and these now rest with the FSF. So legally, Fabien's open letter changes nothing in my opinion as he has relinquished at least the GPL, even though the original copyright might still be his, I would not know how this is legally read.

So this discussion is in the end not about copyright, but about honour, fair use of ideas, and recognition. Which are important enough of course, but inherently less objective to judge as they are guided by unwritten law.

Eelco

[yanquis1972]

Hi John,

perhaps you can explain me ...
Why is playchess important?

What is allowed and what not is a ruling by one person, perhaps a little group of persons. In my opinion not an official ruling and from there not important!

I dont give damn shit.

Best
Frank

i personally do not care either, but i also don't believe it's fair that houdini isn't allowed.

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi John,

each program should be play on an official chess server. Because a program is playing not the person which create that. Its a different!

A chess program have to play chess only, not more and not less. A political debate to the programmers have nothing to search in a game between two chess engines.

The same for a rating list!

That's very simple and easy!
Because a chess program can't eat, need a home, a new shirt a women or a men ... a chess program should be play chess only.

I learned this in the first months of 2010 after all the controversy discuss around IPP family engines.

At first I delete Rybka in SWCR because no IPP family engines no Rybka. Later I add the IPP family engines and Rybka too. To many mails from readers of the chess magazine I am working at this time. The most had written, please add both!

Best
Frank

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

Neither has Fabien much ground for any claim of infringement of his own copyright, even if he had never tried to protect it by means of the GPL. As I understood it Fabien actually relinquished all his rights to Fruit anyway and these now rest with the FSF. So legally, Fabien's open letter changes nothing in my opinion as he has relinquished at least the GPL, even though the original copyright might still be his, I would not know how this is legally read.

Whether the Fabien or the FSF now owns the copyright is not really very relevant.

If it is the latter, do you think the FSF will ignore the opinion of the person who actually wrote the software regarding whether someone else is committing infringement?

Inversely (and this was the case until the letter that started this thread), if Fabien says that in his opinion something is not infringing, do you think the FSF would be likely to initiate legal action, barring massive evidence to the contrary?