As a REAL bean-counter, I thank you for your correction to "legalistic mentality". We accountants very often think "outside the box" and are quite artistic.

I think this is actually the major sticking point. Many people defend Vasik mainly on this ground, that he has obviously had a tremendous original contribution. And indeed, it's impossible to disagree with that. Clearly, if Vas is a plagiarist, he is also a great programmer. Rybka was a tremendous achievement.

But whether one likes/admires Vas or Bob Hyatt is not the only issue here. From the evidence, it appears that Vas has taken code from Fruit, which was published under the GPL. Freely provided code, for use by anyone, provided that any changes and additions are published with the same GPL license. Fabien Letouzey did a wonderful thing by giving his code to the public in trust, and Vas has (apparently) broken that trust. To me, that's the big deal - bigger than the matter of admiring someone's original intellectual contributions or disqualification from computer tournaments.

To take free software for the purpose of making non-free software is really unethical. Vas may even be correct in his assertion that intellectually, his taking from Fruit is not a problem. It's the matter of software freedom that I'm rankled over.

Then I doubly apologize to you, Inky. I'd hate to have you defriend me on Facebook.

I think some free software buffs got their panties in a bunch so prematurely over this issue that it didn't even matter if any foul play did indeed take place. With all the righteous outrage about the free software, it didn't really matter if Railich did anything wrong. The rival programmers who got tired of always being behind and wanted to take Railich down certainly seemed to have taken advantage of those people.

Thanks, Ken. LOL No worries!

Note that question 2 is irrelevant regarding ICGA issues, because Rybka 1.4 and 1.6.1 were private. In other words, they were not published, neither commercially nor as freeware or open source. The ICGA included versions into their investigations, which are none of their business at all.

The way the whole proceedure was conducted by the ICGA, is totally inacceptable.

This debate is several years old. By now, it's obsolete to talk "facts" (or whatever different people think what facts we have and which we have not), anymore. The rest of the story is only about which side will win the battle of opinions, as reflected by relevant media.

I guess this means the end of ICGA's World Computer Chess Championships, sooner or later.

Ah, thanks PB.

ICGA may come to an end, least under that name although I suspect there'll be schisms and new championships made (those allowing Rybka, those not allowing Rybka). Eventually. Maybe.