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Comment by wobblyasp | Hacker News Reader

As long as the license allowed it, I'm not seeing the issue. Sure; it's a less-then-advertised product, but the world is full of those.

If people want to drop 100$ on something that doesn't work as well as the free alternative, more power to them. People do it everyday in the real world.

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While this is something I would expect from a small random company, ChessBase is pretty big in the chess world.

For them to promote this "new" engine on their shop[0] feels wrong, I would expect them to meet certain quality threshold.

Lichess does mention this in the bottom of the post, which has the same feeling:

> Everyone is permitted and encouraged to modify and improve code from Stockfish/Leela while giving credit; that is the intent of open-source software. Everyone is allowed to copy Stockfish/Leela and sell them, provided the terms of the Stockfish/Leela license are met. But don’t pretend that the product being sold is something it isn’t.

[0] https://shop.chessbase.com/en/

You completely missed the point. If people buying this KNEW it was just a free engine with minor tinkering (that apparently even makes it weaker), they would most definitely reconsider. It is the false advertising (https://shop.chessbase.com/en/products/fat_fritz_2, https://en.chessbase.com/post/interview-with-albert-silver-h...) and pretending that is morally bankrupt.

"It is sad to see claims of innovation where there has been none, and claims of improvement in an engine that is weaker than its open-source origins. It is also sad to see people appropriating the open-source work and effort of others and claiming it as their own."

The license allows to use the code, it does NOT allow taking the credit for things you did not do.

There's way too little credit given in open source in general, and I'm glad to see people fight back again (it was more customary to fight back before 2010).

Just like dropshipping, it may be legal but is amoral to many people. And informing the general public is important.

And I might be the only idiot here, but I tried to run stockfish from source and it was not an instant process. In addition, there isn't really a front end, you essentially end up with a CLI to input moves.

And for those who say, hey you, there are prebuilt binaries, just download them! Check out this message [1]

" The binaries at the top of the table are fastest, but may not support all CPUs. If you don't know which CPU you have, you can go down the list and pick the first binary that does not crash. "

Yeah okay, a pragmatic set of instructions that can't fail...

From this I think we could see why a product built on top of stockfish might make sense, even if the linked product might not do as such.

[1]https://stockfishchess.org/download/

Because the engine is not an interface. You can have then engine you want on any interface that supports it. I suppose the easiest way to play stockfish is to click "Play with the computer" on lichess.org, you don't even have to signup!

Then, you will find a /lot/ of GUI interfaces for your favorite OS (Linux, Android, BSD, Win/Mac...), and probably it will have Stockfish included.

As such, you don't have to download or build stockfish, basically any free chess app that you will find will make it available to you. I can think of no reason to make a free chess interface without Stockfish.

There are literally hundreds of FREE stockfish packages with frontend all good to go. To ask 99$ and lie through your teeth when it comes to authorship and performance is a ruse to rip people off, with the help of a famous name, plain and simple.

The issue is it is fraud

> This chess engine is a Stockfish derivative, with a few lines of code modification (engine name, authors list and a few parameters), and a new set of NNUE net weights considered proprietary.

https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/643239805544792064/stat...

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