Chess News of the Week - Programmers write open letter about Rybka-Fruit issue

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.

 

Favorite Chess Sites

What are everyone's favorite chess sites? Where do you like to play? Where do you like to study? Where do you like to find games?

It has been a while since I have posted - work and summer caught up to me and I had too many things going on. I am hoping to start posting regularly again. I have played a game now and then and watched my coworkers fight out some games while I worked and had lunch.

As for my favorite sites, I really like to play on freechess.org. I like Chesslab for finding games. I still have not found a prefered website for studying on, but I do like Chess Tactics Server and Chess Tempo.

Tools used for creating a chess blog

When I started my blog a few weeks ago I had a hard time finding good places to create board images and finding a way to share PGN games. Hopefully this post will help others who decide to create a chess blog.  There are a good number of tools available and I have found these to be great.

• For creating Chess Diagrams, I have been using chessup.net.  The website allows you to setup a board, change the colors as needed and then create an image that you can upload to your blog.  It works great.  
• Another way to create diagrams is to use a program called DiagTransfer.  It is a native Windows program, but it works fine in Crossover Office.  It allows you to add arrows and markers to a board.  I still have not used it but when I get into describing a position more in depth I probably will use the arrows and markers.
• As for posting games, I have found pgn4web to be the best option.   It will accept a PGN game as input and will create a board on the page to show that specific game.
• I use Blogger to host my blog.  It works fairly well and is a common blogging platform that is well supported.
• Scribefire is a nice Firefox addon that allows one to write posts to multiple blogs.  It is highly recommended and cross platform.

If you write a chess blog which tools do you use for sharing games, puzzles etc?  Are there any really nice ones that I missed?