Programmers write open letter about Rybka-Fruit issue
This is very interesting to me as a chess player who has used Fruit and as a Software Developer interested in open source. This is very poor judgement by these guys if they did just steal the code.
Recently the author of Fruit, Fabien Letouzey, wrote an open letter to the computer chess community where he raised the concern that Rybka 1.0 beta may be a derivative of Fruit 2.1 in this public post.
Since then it has emerged from highly respected sources like Zach Wegner, Bob Hyatt and others that there is a lot of evidence that has been accumulated over the last few years that Rybka 1.0 beta is a derivative of Fruit 2.1.
Zach Wegner has presented evidence of alleged significant copied/derived Fruit evaluations in Rybka 1.0 beta here.
The large problem with these guys who stole the code was that Fruit was released under the GPL - part of the license states that any and all code contributed to a project after it uses GPL code is also now considered GPL. That is a part of the deal when you use the code that people are making open. Also you are required to publish any added or changed code. If Rybka is guilty they are stealing from the public and selling what they stole instead of building on a project that was established as an open project. It will be interesting to see how this procedes and if they are required to open their code and pay a fine.
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