An Old Engine

[MikeB]

I bought every version of Houdini ever sold. I am feeling no sting from it.
The exchange of information wrought by an engine being open source is intended, and indeed almost every strong engine borrows concepts from other strong engines.
Of course, we should do this without breaking the law (goes without saying).
I never have buyer's remorse.
For instance, I spend a lot of money on hardware for chess and other things.
If I sat and waited, I could have spend exponentially less money and got the same power.
Or I could have spent the same money and got exponentially more power.
But in the meantime, I had a wonderful machine that did everything I asked of it and it made me happy, not sad.

Similarly with Houdini. I bought Houdini because it is extraordinarily good a solving tough chess problems that other computer chess programs may have difficulty with. During the time that I had it, I used it to analyze literally millions of chess positions.
Now I see that Mr. Houdart may have made illegitimate use of code that did not belong to him.
But that changes nothing about the benefit to me from using his program in the past.
Better still, because the code is based on Stockfish, I will be able to splice in some of my code to write the analysis directly to disk in a format that is easy to load into my database systems. Hey, double bonus.

Getting your bun in a knot never accomplishes anything. Sure, we all do it from time to time, but what good came of it?

Quite true a from a user perspective, and I’m with you on that point. But for the developers , and I’m not talking about me , but the hard core Stockfish developers and especially the maintainers and the key contributors , I can feel what they are feeling. For you and I, we just move on and we have the source that we can modify. And we’re better actually off. I have purchased all of the engines numerous times , not only from Robert , but Stefan , Larry and Mark , Richard Lang, Mark Uniacke and the list goes on and on and I never had buyers remorse for any engine. And I have no remorse for buying Houdini either.

[Dann Corbit]

I agree completely that the SF team is the injured party.

[Ras]

I agree completely that the SF team is the injured party.

And probably also Mbed, commercial manufacturer of Polar SSL which is also included under GPL.

[MikeB]

"Judge, jury and executioner" is simply an expression - basically meaning someone who judges and punishes unilaterally. It seems to fit in your case.

Well, that’s not me - it sounds more like you actually. I’m just exercising my intellectual property rights that I believe I now have. Furthermore the issue is not between you and me at all. So I’m not really sure how you got your panties in a twist over this.

[Graham Banks]

"Judge, jury and executioner" is simply an expression - basically meaning someone who judges and punishes unilaterally. It seems to fit in your case.

Well, that’s not me - it sounds more like you actually. I’m just exercising my intellectual property rights that I believe I now have. Furthermore the issue is not between you and me at all. So I’m not really sure how you got your panties in a twist over this.

Seems a very un-Christian thing to do at Easter, but then not all of us adhere to Christian beliefs.

[jhellis3]

Clearly...

[MikeB]

"Judge, jury and executioner" is simply an expression - basically meaning someone who judges and punishes unilaterally. It seems to fit in your case.

Well, that’s not me - it sounds more like you actually. I’m just exercising my intellectual property rights that I believe I now have. Furthermore the issue is not between you and me at all. So I’m not really sure how you got your panties in a twist over this.

Seems a very un-Christian thing to do at Easter, but then not all of us adhere to Christian beliefs.

John 8:7 - great verse!

[Graham Banks]

"Judge, jury and executioner" is simply an expression - basically meaning someone who judges and punishes unilaterally. It seems to fit in your case.

Well, that’s not me - it sounds more like you actually. I’m just exercising my intellectual property rights that I believe I now have. Furthermore the issue is not between you and me at all. So I’m not really sure how you got your panties in a twist over this.

Seems a very un-Christian thing to do at Easter, but then not all of us adhere to Christian beliefs.

John 8:7 - great verse!

Nice excuse.

[Eelco de Groot]

I agree completely that the SF team is the injured party.

I don't really want to get into this discussion, but I have a feeling if you would ask someone like Marco Costalba, that he would expect it to happen with Stockfish code because for instance the GPL does not give much protection. Fruit being a case in point. And I think he does not care super much, even if he was still very active, nor would the other developers, well most of them I think. But that is just a guess of mine. Stockfish gets its advantage from the continuing development and testing and lone developers have to build in all sorts of copy protection, have to deal with buying customers, have limited testing hardware, very limited development time as single developers, doing everything on their own etc. Is it not much more Mark Lefler and Larry Kaufman, and maybe a few others who are still making commercial chessprograms, with their own ideas, who are the injured party here? That was my first reaction. What others do wth the Stockfish code, well it will be hard to do better than Stockfish even if they copy it a 100% I would not care about infringement of the GPL, of course it is wrong but it is very hard to hide and using the ideas, rewriting algorithms is not protected anyway. This is more a sportsmanship question for what I care.

[jhellis3]

Nice excuse.

Careful, it is a long fall from up there....