"Public court hearing soon!"

[AndrewGrant]

FF2 had a network embedded in the object code, so according to my understanding it is part of the corresponding source.

Ah, the old cure clause.

Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.

Did you read your own preceding paragraph? You know, about the embedded network? Then you write this?

That blog post linked earlier by dkappe also appears irrelevant, as it heavily assumes the case relies on the neural network part, which I think was debunked a few times (and also pretty obvious consider sni and tord are involved?).

I hope your lawyers are better.

I'm sure he understands the cure clause. And I'm sure he understands that the argument is that repeated violations, even if eventually cured, are cause for termination. I don't get why you hand wave the entire issue away. Do you really not see a single drop of substantive claims which deserve to be litigated?

EDIT: I suppose if this public hearing is what I think, then ChessBase would move to have the suit dismissed and give their reasons. And if that happened, then your stance would certainly be the correct one.

[dkappe]

Andy,

There could be some violation or fact that isn’t public that would make SF’s case less flimsy. But based just on what is public? No. It can be litigated, but to what end?

[Uri Blass]

I think the matter is hardly relevant by the time this bureaucracy comes to any conclusion, the reality is that it took long enough for someone to assert that it never actually happened. While FF2 is more of a meme now, it can still generate some entertainment once in a while.

Verdict is already in for the court of public opinion (https://lichess.org/blog/YCvy7xMAACIA80 ... -a-rip-off)
Question is whether or not people not in-the-know continue to be ripped off by hacks like Albert, Houdart, among others.

At this point, the only people giving any time to these illegal clones are some of the rating lists, and the kinds of posters here that think a PSQT altered Stockfish is worth writing threads about. And the rating lists are _mostly_ a historical thing, not an actively testing new versions -- like in Fire's case having its results pulled from CEGT for having reused a Stockfish network in an already Stockfish-forked engine. Fire and Houdini are ex communicado from both Chess.com's CCC as well as TCEC's events. DeusX and Fat Fritz 2 are so beyond that status that I cannot recall seeing a single conversation about either engine with respect to CCC or TCEC.

Would be nice for a ruling in favor of Stockfish team though. Anything else calls into question the point of licensing under the GPLv3. Someone hands you this incredible gift, and there are only a small number of strings attached. And somehow people still manage to bite the hand that feeds them.

Fire is not a Stockfish 'fork', it's open source and attributions are abundant and clear. Ethereal actually has higher Similarity (SIM test) to SF in my tests. Fire and Houdini were removed from TCEC and CCC primarily because of your (and your fanboys) pressure and bullying.

Yes let's clean things up entirely, which means Ethereal should be included along with Houdini and Fat Fritz...or any such complaint. Let's consider the fact that you're making money (just like Chessbase and Houdini) while your codebase contains whole pages of source code taken directly from Stockfish...and there's absolutely no mention or attribution to them on your commercial web page, or on your github readme.md other than:

https://github.com/AndyGrant/Ethereal/b ... /windows.c
"Current code from Stockfish authors."

I do not believe the author of Ethereal makes a lot of money based on selling Ethereal and I doubt if he has whole pages of source code taken directly from stockfish.

I believe that you need some relative advantage to free engines in order to make more money and it is more important than rating.

I believe that there are going to be more buyers for an engine that is 200 elo weaker than stockfish but has many relative advantages to free engines that are not rating points and less buyers for an engine that is 50 elo weaker than stockfish but has no significant relative advantage relative to free engines.

Relative advantages can be many things.

Some examples

1)Ability to find mates faster
2)Ability to have a setting when the engine search for a forced draw in x moves or for winning material in x moves.
3)Ability to get a better result against other engines with some material handicap
4)Ability to learn in order to do better from a specific position against a deterministic opponent(doing better can be losing in more moves if you find no way to draw)
5)Ability to do automatic analysis of games in order to find all positions when the side to move win material in X plies(these may be interesting tactical exercises for humans even if the winning material move is bad because the opponent get a winning attack for the material and practically the relevant move may lose material if you search for X+20 plies forward).

[AndrewGrant]

I do not believe the author of Ethereal makes a lot of money based on selling Ethereal and I doubt if he has whole pages of source code taken directly from stockfish.

Its been hashed out a billion times, but he is (dishonestly) referring to the windows.c file in Ethereal, which is used only for Windows machines with 64+ cores, due to some Windows issues that otherwise make allocation of that many threads hard.

The code was originally written by Texel author Peter. The code then made its way through a number of Stockfish forks, before finally arriving in the main Stockfish branch. My code is a near verbatim version of that file. The source of that code is noted and attributed directly inside the file. This file appears in pretty much every engine I am aware of. It rivals Syzygy as one of those universal chess libraries.

The only person taking issue with it is Norman, a repeat offender of violating open source projects. If Peter, or a Stockfish author, or anyone holding any claim to the code in question were to contact me about it, I would certainly remedy the issue as they saw fit. Because I am a reasonable, good faith participant in the GPL and chess community.

And yes, there is not much money in Ethereal. Many reasons -- the universal dominance of Stockfish, the existence of a stronger product in Komodo, as well as my decision to thus far have all Ethereal versions be a one time payment. For example, I am near the release of 13.75. Anyone owning a prior version will get an email with an update. And in some months time, they will get another for 14.00.

But this conversation is hijacked now, so I won't carry it on any further in this thread.

-----

July 4th. God speed to Stockfish authors. May they find what they are looking for.

[reflectionofpower]

It AWAYS comes down to who has the most $$ for legal representation. I quote, "This is a court of law, not justice."

[Sopel]

It AWAYS comes down to who has the most $$ for legal representation. I quote, "This is a court of law, not justice."

I would fear for chessbase if that's the case

[bastiball]

I wonder what will happen after the public court hearing.

[AdminX]

Since this is a public hearing, is there a chance that it will be streamed online somewhere?

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Norman,

two different groups of fanboys !!!

1. Harmless persons and "programmers" have an other opinion to this or that. Example to your engine. But allways the people are fair without any attacks. Absolutey to accept!

2. And the hard group of fanboys. Here different people are inside, sent me copies from mails. I read as non programmer my name very often and know exactly what different people try in the background or which people do that. That is what I mean with "Kindergarten" or group buildings.

We all have the same hobby, should be at first in foreground.

Very important for the "Harder group" are rating systems and the work normally users do here. We know that in all the years the community have different problems with this or that. But at the moment are very difficult persons on the way. It calms that this group of people do not notice that he have played friends.

It should be not a problem to create an own rating system for each one (main problem this people have).
That's not a big work and very easy, for programmers also.
You do that for a while ... great!

Why not on an engine site an own list?

Ratings = Snapshots only!
People like to do that should have fun with such a work and not stress and problems if other don't like to see this or that.

Best
Frank

[Frank Quisinsky]

Discremination should have not a place in chess-community.
My opinion ...