First of all, let me apologize if I appeared to be harsh towards you. I feel strongly about the issue, but I do not feel strongly against you.Tomcass wrote:Hi Adam.
I appreciate your comment very much, although I thing you are not right in a couple of points:
1.- "You are hiding behind your lack of technical knowledge in order to justify testing Heron ... ".
I am not trying to justify or hiding anything. I simply enjoy testing and do it. I have never checked if an engine is a clone or not, although I have obviously read some comments about Heron.
2.- "You are showing a lack of respect to Tord, Marco, Joona, and the other contributors to the Stockfish project".
It is a big surprise for me to read this. You make me feel as if I was the Kennedy's killer. I was not aware at all of this sensitivity of my admired Stockfish Team to be offended by a simple test. If so, I obviously apologize to them.
And please do not forget, Adam, that I am also an informal contributor to the Stockfish Project -I am sure the smallest one-. But I have spent thousands of hours testing Stockfish in my computers and the number of downloads of the games produced is quite relevant. So that according to your dramatic words perhaps I am even offending to myself.
Tord, Marco, Joona and all SF Team I am very sorry if you have felt that a couple of tests are a lack of respect for your great work. I hope you don't.
Best regards,
Tom.
I do mean that there is enough information in the Heron thread at the Immortal forum and here to have grave doubts about Heron being an original engine. If you say that you are no judge, that seems to mean that you have decided to not look too close at the evidence.
Also, Marco has been vocal about the Stockfish's license being properly followed. The license is GPL, which demands that the source code of any derivative work be made available. Heron is closed source.
I know that you have spent much time testing Stockfish, and I appreciate that you have shared your testing with the CCC community. But testing Heron is not respectful to the Stockfish team. The person behind Heron made some changes and then released the engine as his own work with no acknowledgement of the work done by authors of Stockfish. That is not right. And the end users (those of us who test and use the creations of the authors) bear some responsibility in protecting the authors' work. This goes for all authors and their creations. If we allow an environment where it is acceptable for people to steal other people's work and claim it as their own, then the people who create the engines would have a lot less desire to make their engines available to us.
