Fat Fritz 2 is a rip-off

@Alexander_501_Q300 Let me point something out for you. You're writing in plain text and I don't know you. There was literally no hint dropped that it wasn't serious. I've seen enough of such posts meant seriously.

@BornlessOne if giving money to chessbase angers people like you it gives me even more of a reason to buy it

@j9035 It doesn't anger me that you want to waste money. I am just pointing out that you do not value the work of other people and so in my view you don't deserve any chess engine - not even a stolen one.

I suggest for everyone to pirate chessbase same way they broke the license of open source stockfish and sold it to gullible people as "fat fritz 2" if you bought their product consider pirating next time.

Since the software is open sourced (and the FF2 software was improperly marketed) would it not be possible to replicate Silver's process and then match the newly cloned FF2 against the original Stockfish? Would be a fitting demonstration.

Interesting. I have been using ChessBase and Fritz/Stockfish daily for years, and I usually upgrade when a new version comes out. I find that in their advertisements, they often bullet-point some old features they have, and it looks like they are new features. Usually I feel a little underwhelmed by the upgrades, yet I don't regret the purchase.

I bought Fat Fritz, and installed a graphics card to get it to work. I was overall satisfied by the product.

I understood that they used open source ideas, but I trusted that the authors and ChessBase were being somewhat innovative, and I assumed they were giving fair credit to Leela, since I never heard of Leela until I started using Fat Fritz 1.

I figured that they were offering a somewhat user-friendly way of playing with machine learning, for those who are familiar with the Fritz GUI (but installing the graphics card or doing any hardware upgrades to my computer is outside of my comfort zone a little).

This blog article brings up many ideas that make me reconsider everything. I didn't know Fat Fritz 2 was out until reading it, and I guess I won't be making the upgrade anytime soon.

@jeffreyashton Thank you for this. Nice to hear my suspicion confirmed that people outside computer chess just don't know any better and (maybe subconsciously) think "it's Chessbase - I used it for years and it works. What they write sounds believable". In fact neither Fat Fritz 1 nor Fat Fritz 2 were innovative but how are you supposed to know if you're not deeply into computer chess like I am? If people read about computer chess they read on Chessbase and CB fully exploits that. It is only if you look deeper that you find out about their very misleading marketing and disrespect for the work of others.

@BornlessOne I also don't understand what is ethical and what's not in this department. I have a friend named Vasik Rajlich who is known for writing Rybka, then being in charge of one of the editions of Fritz. Overall, he was well liked, and people had favorable opinions about him. But then there was someone accusing him of using open source code and not giving credit. It seemed unclear to me what the complaints were. I believed that his work was fair, ethical, and assumed the complaints were unfair. But I am also friends with him and I trust his character.

My main point is, I'm a pretty advanced chess computer user who kind of follows this stuff, even the ethical considerations of how to use open source material, and this is all kind of new and confusing to me.

I don't want to get too general, but doesn't this kind of debate also come up when thinking about Google using Chromium... I'm sure there are major examples beyond chess?

@jeffreyashton the short rule is: you are allowed to use open source material for a very wide range of activities, but you MUST respect their license.
FOSS licenses are written by smart people, with the intent of keeping free software free, properly attributed and available to everyone.

When Google transforms Chromium into Chrome, it does so respecting Chromium's license, giving proper rights to the end users and attributions to Chromium's developers.
CB has absolutely trashed the licenses of the engines it copied, last week some of the more egregious abuses of SF's license have been corrected after the backlash, but just the fact they tried that hard to steal work makes them deserving of the public ridicule.

what is a RIP OFF?