Thoughts on Fruit=Rybka EVAL

[Chris Whittington]

I really hope the FSF follows this one through, just so we all get to see you blame yet another organization (and everyone else) for Vas' misconduct...The FSF essentially exists to follow cases like this through (along with its legal arm, the SFLC), and has already decided to pursue it. I think (haven't heard in awhile, and France treats August as a month for vacation) they are currently chasing down contact details for all known R1-R232a distributors as the initial course of action, and will send them [in an official manner] their standard form letter, asking them to comply with the GPL restrictions regarding source code availability, blah-blah-blah.

Assembling the case for monetary damages will then occur later. I'm not in the loop, but my impression is that it is essentially "certain" that the case will be seen through (one way or the other), according to Fabien's wishes. The evidence is more than sufficient, as is the magnitude of any benefits derived from Fruit-infringement. If the FSF didn't go through with this, one might wonder what the use of transferring copyright to them could possibly be.

As such, my opinion is that there is principally one endpoint at this juncture: a drawn-out court case [maybe in multiple jurisdictions, but as I say, the FSF/SFLC have little better to do -- this case is probably even a "big fish" to them!]. And as Don Dailey put it (amidst a barrage of other comments), the inevitable verdict of "guilty" for copyright infringement seems clear. The only question is the percentage award. Combined with the quirks of Polish copyright law (triple damages, and a 2x contribution to a "Ministry Fund for Creativity" -- see pages 1049-50 here, or Sections 79,1-2 of the Polish Copyright Act), I don't think that a maximal liability for Rajlich of 7 figures (in euros) is any exaggeration, though it depends on the exact percentages awarded, not to mention the actual extent of Rybka profitability.

OTOH, the FSF itself mostly cares about its "free software" philosophy, and only pursues damages on the behalf of those who transfer them copyright, at least until lawyers get involved [when they also ask for compensation therein]

License Violations and Compliance
by Brett Smith — last modified September 29, 2010 11:37
The FSF Compliance Lab helps enforce the licenses for all free software.

Compliance Philosophy
We receive reports about free software license violations from the public every month, and we investigate them all. Since the FSF holds the copyrights for a number of popular programs, such as GNU bash and wget, we can usually take immediate action against the violator — and either way, we work with other interested copyright holders to help ensure everyone's licenses are protected.

Many copyright holders seek monetary damages when their license is violated. We do not — we only want violators to come back into compliance, and help repair any harm done to the free software community by their past actions. Because of that, we contact violators directly, and negotiate a strategy with them that best accomplishes those goals. Oftentimes the violation is unintentional, and people are happy to have help getting their work straightened out. When a violator is less cooperative, we call on the resources of the Software Freedom Law Center to help come to an agreement.

So, the FSF *might* be persuaded to ask for publication of source in order to bring the licence back into compliance. But apparently the source no longer exists. Since FSF do not seek monetary damages, there is no source, what are you asking them to go to court in Poland for exactly? Lawyer fees, translation fees, interpreter fees - someone is going to front pay all those for what reward exactly?

[Rebel]

I double checked, did a search on the word "notes" (even on "note") but the information simply is gone.

I also made a correction to the ordering in this post. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1559&start=50#p13748

Oki doki, mystery explained. Perhaps you can leave a trace when you modify a posting like the much used "Edit *" in fora. It was pretty confusing revisiting a post and find essential info suddenly missing.

[Rebel]

Jeez. The information is on page 2 of this thread. If you're too lazy: viewtopic.php?p=13622#p13622

Is it really necessary to accuse Mark of something untowards here?

About Jeez......

Do not jump into conclusions too early

See my answer to BB.

[BB+]

You have of course pointed out to the FSF that

a) the PST section of the reports stands in ruins
b) there begins to be a suspicion that you cherry picked the comparators on COMP_EVAL
c) the panel was specially selected to exclude critical voices
d) the main panel gatekeeper has been lying and exaggerating the evidence
e) numerous members of the panel and complaining programmers stand to gain from convicting Vas
f) that suspicious matches have also been found with other programs

etc etc

You also could point these out to the FSF -- and as you seem to believe them, I'd say you are the superior person to do so, rather than I. In the limited contact I have had with their "License Compliance Engineer" [quite a fancy title], we did not discuss the evidence per se, but rather he inquired what I knew of the Rybka history, and (essentially) if there were Fruit-derived versions that were currently being distributed.

Further, I think all 6 of your points are debatable, if not dubious. I will just choose one (a), and refer you to this, which is where I think the PST issue currently stands [I can make a new thread, if you prefer]. I might also note that I estimated that it was less than 1% of the issue, so ignoring it doesn't change much.

Or maybe another (b), and refer you again to this. In this regard, I might remind you of your own words (with many other such examples), from back in 2008: Accuse first, hunt for the evidence later does seem the wrong way round. [I do like the way you avoided libel in (b) by "begins to be a suspicion" (even with zero evidence, of even a beginning)].

The next three (c-e) of the 6 points (even assuming they were true) are rather useless in the context here, as the FSF would not be interested in personalities, but rather actual evidence. If you have any of the latter (or analysis thereof), you might send it to them if you think it would aid them in comprehending the picture more fully. I am not sure to what you refer in (f), but copyright infringement by other programs does not change the R/F situation?!

Can you explain why you, as supposed "expert technical witness" is continually trying to terrorise Vas with the quirks of Polish Law? What do the mechanics/logistics of legal process have to do with you exactly, or is your role wider than you lead us to believe?

I have said to Fabien that I would be willing to produce (gratis) an "expert opinion" that summarises the ICGA evidence, and relate it to copyright law. Discussions I had with those more versed in law (on, e.g., the ChessVibes comments page with some quasi-anonymous person, or with John Manis here), stressed that "local" law is quite important.

So I had to research the issue a bit (not wishing to merely follow the "useful idiot" Speer-ish description that might else apply), and found almost universal agreement that Poland happens to have the most stringent laws on copyright in the world, and furthermore the harshest penalties for violators.

(quoting the FSF compliance regime) Many copyright holders seek monetary damages when their license is violated. We do not — we only want violators to come back into compliance, and help repair any harm done to the free software community by their past actions.

You might ask GCP concerning this, with the current case(s) he has concerning copyright infringement of Sjeng. He can tell you that while the FSF itself does not pursue monetary damages, they will do so when requested by the original author (and do this via the SFLC). If you back up to the previous paragraph, you will see that Brett Smith's comments are most directly related to software the GNU project has itself produced (wget and bash). As noted elsewhere (and by others, such as GCP), it would be a major disincentive to copyright transference if the FSF categorically refused to touch monetary issues (and yes, you can make money off "free software", as dual-licensing examples have shown, not to mention that Fabien himself was commercialising Fruit in the example here).

So, the FSF *might* be persuaded to ask for publication of source in order to bring the licence back into compliance. But apparently the source no longer exists. Since FSF do not seek monetary damages [...]

I think you are building a strawman, and have little (if any) understanding of the FSF process. E.g., once the violator chooses not to (or cannot) comply with the GPL, it diverges into copyright law, and the SFLC. If one looks further down in that page, one can find what the FSF thinks of the above quoted phrase "we only want violators to come back into compliance, and help repair any harm done to the free software community by their past actions":

We also ask violators to do what they can to amend their errors. For example, if they failed to provide source to their previous customers, they may be able to contact those people to offer it now, or at least make the information public so anyone who's interested can find it. They can usually manage to do something that helps give users back the rights they were always supposed to have under the license.

As the tone of that page might indicate, the FSF expects most violators to be "accidental", who are perfectly willing to "put things right" (where "right" means as the FSF connotes the word, vis-a-vis "free software"). I don't think this case falls into that basket. When the violator cannot (or will not) repair any harm to the "free software community" (in the manner the FSF sees fit), there's really no viable option but spendy lawsuits. In short, I don't think you should interpret the "philosophical statement" of the FSF Compliance Lab to apply universally, and particularly in the R/F case.

[Rebel]

Well, looks an easy job to me to compare the 3 UCI signatures of Fruit / Rybka / Strelka. Do they match ?

Again you seem to be asking for a conclusion, while I would rather point you to the evidence, and let you decide and/or argue it through -- sorry if this is not what you wanted. In this regard, see 6.3 of RYBKA_FRUIT. I could expand the evidential enumeration therein [as 6.3 is a condensed patchwork of various points], but for you I see no point in that [and you'd have to assume that I did it correctly]. In this regard (for UCI parsing), I don't think Strelka's source code is a good surrogate for Rybka (should I conclude it's thereby not a clone/derivative?! ). Better to look at Rick Fadden's disassembly (the link is in 6.3), if you want more details.

Before continuing it's time we need to talk about something else.

It's obvious here and elsewhere my questions irritate you up to the point you call them silly.

Mind you that the presented evidence in the documents of the PST's in the meantime successfully are undermined by Miguel, Chris and me and that at best the conclusion would be inconclusive and I am judging mild here. It's best that the PST's and any reference to them are removed from the documents. In your hunt for matching numbers (quite creative, I admit) you simply have forgotten a couple of aspects in your considerations that led to your final conclusion that Fruit-PST = Rybka PST.

That in other words you have accused Vas that he took the Fruit initialization code, calculated the results, then stored the results in Rybka, then obfuscated the data with two formula, 3200 and 3399.

And that the accusation is false.

Therefore, if my questions irritate you, did the panel people when they asked pesky questions also irritate you? But then by your own admission they hardly asked you any questions at all regarding the PST's.

So, can we leave out the disparaging comments or not ?

[hyatt]

I didn't ask many questions because I took the time to take Zach's code, convert it into a real program, and looked to see what the numbers looked like. I actually did something with his report. I even went back and figured out where I had saved all that stuff and posted some of it here and on the Rybka forum. That is _I_ did SOMETHING other than just say "looks guilty" I vote guilty.. Oops. Now looks innocent. I retract my vote. I didn't vote until I was certain. You should try that, you end up looking MUCH less foolish...

[BB+]

Mind you that the presented evidence in the documents of the PST's in the meantime successfully are undermined by Miguel, Chris and me and that at best the conclusion would be inconclusive and I am judging mild here. It's best that the PST's and any reference to them are removed from the documents. In your hunt for matching numbers (quite creative, I admit) you simply have forgotten a couple of aspects in your considerations that led to your final conclusion that Fruit-PST = Rybka PST.

You must be confusing me with someone else, as I never "concluded" this. My current opinion of the situation can be seen here, and I think my estimate (that given the Fruit process/idea, the chance of the specific match of ramping arrays derived from the Rybka data is ~1%) is quite charitable toward Rybka. As both you and ChrisW (and maybe Miguel) still seem interested in this, perhaps a new thread should be created. If nothing else, it might be nice to discuss something specific, w/o side issues and subject-changing.

So, can we leave out the disparaging comments or not ?

No worries. As long as we don't return to flimsy theories that "all top engines in 2005 used essentially the same evaluation code", or that 5.5 months is an unthinkably short time to rewrite code, or that the "evaluation ordering" could be the alpha-and-omega of the R/F case, I will cease any mocking. Any irritation, however, also derived from how you went about some things (as opposed to the colloquy in the Panel), such as the volcanic reaction to Wylie's "possible", pithy dismissals (directed at me) like "I am so sorry for all your work", the continued mis-impression that the Panel "had no dissenting voices", ...

[Chris Whittington]

briefly, and in general, I take no interest in talking to FSF or ICGA. We have now a very democratic, transparent and information packed place to debate all these issues, that is on open forums. There are even enough forums to get round the problems of political bannings, or individuals dislikes of certain forums. We have an open transparent democracy yet you prefer to go running to undemocratic judgemental places to get closure. Revealing.

Nice of you to grant Fabien a no lose status re your charges, 100 USD per hour or so you keep trumpeting.

If this goes to court though, in Poland you seem to prefer since the monies are allegedly better there, you'll have the opportunity, if Vas loses, to ask the court to claim your expert witness costs/expenses/profit element to be paid to you direct. Which appears to put you into a no win no fee situation. Vested interest in not only guilt, but guilt via court process rather than compromise. Share of the spoils hardly produces unbiased expert witnesses, now does it?

Perhaps you could take this opportunity to clear any misunderstanding and state unequivocably that you will decline any form of compensation from whatever source and that your entire contribution, including expenses, has been and will be funded from your own pocket without any attempt by you to recover anything?

Perhaps you could also reassure us that there is no research angle to any of this and you have not and will not use this process and/or its results in any academic furtherences.

Just trying to help you establish yourself as totally unbiased and quite altruistic .....

You have of course pointed out to the FSF that

a) the PST section of the reports stands in ruins
b) there begins to be a suspicion that you cherry picked the comparators on COMP_EVAL
c) the panel was specially selected to exclude critical voices
d) the main panel gatekeeper has been lying and exaggerating the evidence
e) numerous members of the panel and complaining programmers stand to gain from convicting Vas
f) that suspicious matches have also been found with other programs

etc etc

You also could point these out to the FSF -- and as you seem to believe them, I'd say you are the superior person to do so, rather than I. In the limited contact I have had with their "License Compliance Engineer" [quite a fancy title], we did not discuss the evidence per se, but rather he inquired what I knew of the Rybka history, and (essentially) if there were Fruit-derived versions that were currently being distributed.

Further, I think all 6 of your points are debatable, if not dubious. I will just choose one (a), and refer you to this, which is where I think the PST issue currently stands [I can make a new thread, if you prefer]. I might also note that I estimated that it was less than 1% of the issue, so ignoring it doesn't change much.

Or maybe another (b), and refer you again to this. In this regard, I might remind you of your own words (with many other such examples), from back in 2008: Accuse first, hunt for the evidence later does seem the wrong way round. [I do like the way you avoided libel in (b) by "begins to be a suspicion" (even with zero evidence, of even a beginning)].

The next three (c-e) of the 6 points (even assuming they were true) are rather useless in the context here, as the FSF would not be interested in personalities, but rather actual evidence. If you have any of the latter (or analysis thereof), you might send it to them if you think it would aid them in comprehending the picture more fully. I am not sure to what you refer in (f), but copyright infringement by other programs does not change the R/F situation?!

Can you explain why you, as supposed "expert technical witness" is continually trying to terrorise Vas with the quirks of Polish Law? What do the mechanics/logistics of legal process have to do with you exactly, or is your role wider than you lead us to believe?

I have said to Fabien that I would be willing to produce (gratis) an "expert opinion" that summarises the ICGA evidence, and relate it to copyright law. Discussions I had with those more versed in law (on, e.g., the ChessVibes comments page with some quasi-anonymous person, or with John Manis here), stressed that "local" law is quite important.

So I had to research the issue a bit (not wishing to merely follow the "useful idiot" Speer-ish description that might else apply), and found almost universal agreement that Poland happens to have the most stringent laws on copyright in the world, and furthermore the harshest penalties for violators.

(quoting the FSF compliance regime) Many copyright holders seek monetary damages when their license is violated. We do not — we only want violators to come back into compliance, and help repair any harm done to the free software community by their past actions.

You might ask GCP concerning this, with the current case(s) he has concerning copyright infringement of Sjeng. He can tell you that while the FSF itself does not pursue monetary damages, they will do so when requested by the original author (and do this via the SFLC). If you back up to the previous paragraph, you will see that Brett Smith's comments are most directly related to software the GNU project has itself produced (wget and bash). As noted elsewhere (and by others, such as GCP), it would be a major disincentive to copyright transference if the FSF categorically refused to touch monetary issues (and yes, you can make money off "free software", as dual-licensing examples have shown, not to mention that Fabien himself was commercialising Fruit in the example here).

So, the FSF *might* be persuaded to ask for publication of source in order to bring the licence back into compliance. But apparently the source no longer exists. Since FSF do not seek monetary damages [...]

I think you are building a strawman, and have little (if any) understanding of the FSF process. E.g., once the violator chooses not to (or cannot) comply with the GPL, it diverges into copyright law, and the SFLC. If one looks further down in that page, one can find what the FSF thinks of the above quoted phrase "we only want violators to come back into compliance, and help repair any harm done to the free software community by their past actions":

We also ask violators to do what they can to amend their errors. For example, if they failed to provide source to their previous customers, they may be able to contact those people to offer it now, or at least make the information public so anyone who's interested can find it. They can usually manage to do something that helps give users back the rights they were always supposed to have under the license.

As the tone of that page might indicate, the FSF expects most violators to be "accidental", who are perfectly willing to "put things right" (where "right" means as the FSF connotes the word, vis-a-vis "free software"). I don't think this case falls into that basket. When the violator cannot (or will not) repair any harm to the "free software community" (in the manner the FSF sees fit), there's really no viable option but spendy lawsuits. In short, I don't think you should interpret the "philosophical statement" of the FSF Compliance Lab to apply universally, and particularly in the R/F case.

[Terry McCracken]

What will you say when the FSF finds Vas guilty of copyright infringement??? You sure don't have any problem slamming your peers to protect one dubious programmer. What the hell Ed?

Hey Terry, hope you are well.

Regarding the question, what will you say when the FSF frees Vas of guilt?

Pretty pointless huh?

Take care.

I'll restate it...When the FSF finds Vas guilty. The almost certain outcome.

[BB+]

We have an open transparent democracy yet you prefer to go running to undemocratic judgemental places to get closure. Revealing.

Not sure what the referent "open transparency democracy" is. In any event, democracies are also just as famous for trampling minority rights. My recollection is that Aristotle calls them the worst of sociopolitical systems (yet then goes on to describe many in detail, often speaking of their positive aspects). I also might quote your words on the Rybka Forum (aimed at FL): If, as open source programmer, you wish to assert rights or copyrights, go to law, otherwise shut up. It seems he has chosen to do the former (and indeed avoids forums, "democratic" or otherwise, as far as I can tell).

I myself am personally a bit closer to a "commercial" programmer (yes, Magma is licensed at something like $1500 for 3 years, though I also produce other code and maths research), and indeed I had a bitter argument with a colleague 6 years ago when he tried to get me to release some maths code under the GPL [in fact, I spent 20-30 hours re-writing it, so that it would not be so encumbered].

If this goes to court though, in Poland you seem to prefer since the monies are allegedly better there, you'll have the opportunity, if Vas loses, to ask the court to claim your expert witness costs/expenses/profit element to be paid to you direct. Which appears to put you into a no win no fee situation.

These seems to be a mischaracterisation of Polish courts. For instance, Polish lawyers are not allowed (by the ethics of the bar) to work exclusively [or even primarily, it seems] on a contingency basis. Legal costs therein are payable by the loser, but fall under a fixed scale: The legal costs are limited to the fees of one attorney which are calculated on the basis of the value of the claim according to the scale provided for in the law (anecdotes indicate this typically does not cover the totality of the lawyer's share in practise). There is no provision for additional "expert costs" to the best of my knowledge, although if the court appoints an "expert", then the loser must pay the court costs involved in that. At any rate, it seems reasonable for the FSF to handle the "probative" (and thus less technical) aspects of the copying via their own (lackey) "experts", particularly as this will allow them to justify the existence of such.

Vested interest in not only guilt, but guilt via court process rather than compromise.

A bit strange, then, that I should be "terrorising" persons into a settlement as previously suggested? Your argument seems to grasp in various directions, rather than following a consistent pattern.

100 USD per hour or so you keep trumpeting.

That was a joke at Ed! Everyone knows that academics are lucky to make half that. I talked about the "conflict of interest" elsewhere. I get nada (as in zip, zilch-o) in any event. The only exception might be if I were asked to testify in person.

Perhaps you could take this opportunity to clear any misunderstanding and state unequivocably that you will decline any form of compensation from whatever source and that your entire contribution, including expenses, has been and will be funded from your own pocket without any attempt by you to recover anything?

Perhaps you could also reassure us that there is no research angle to any of this and you have not and will not use this process and/or its results in any academic furtherences.

Just trying to help you establish yourself as totally unbiased and quite altruistic .....

I affirm the above two "Perhaps" statements, with the caveat just mentioned. [But this hardly is proof of being "unbiased", as you surely know, and indeed IIRC you concluded no one could truly be labelled such]. E.g., my plans to visit Tilburg this November are out-of-pocket (it may not seem to you that Banff is close to Tilburg, but then, you aren't in Sydney to start -- and I'll catch my family up for Thanksgiving on the way back, so the cost is partially offset by other travel), the only academic connection is that I offered to visit the number theory group in Leiden. [Incidentally, I once had a debate with a colleague whether we could claim our own frequent-flyer miles when being re-imbursed by the university -- I argued in the negative].