Chessbase is not putting its mouth where its money is

[PeterTurland]

It is quite obvious that Chessbase does not support opensource, like where is the Linux client for becoming a member of their online chess community?

Why does Chessbase support and promote the Microsoft monopoly, whilst at the same have a story line on their front page lauding two of the great gods of UNIX, (Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie) a far better operating system than Windows?

Linux is open source UNIX.

[Roger de Coverly]

Why does Chessbase support and promote the Microsoft monopoly

There are chess geeks and computer geeks and there's relatively little overlap between the two. Go back twenty years and whilst some chess players were early adopters of personal computers (even in the days of DOS) it was because of the existence and availability of chess software. Go back even further and ChessBase ran on Ataris with the PC version a slightly poor relation.

So ChessBase just follow their market - people who are more interested in strangely named opening systems than strangely named operating systems.

[PeterTurland]

Why does Chessbase support and promote the Microsoft monopoly

There are chess geeks and computer geeks and there's relatively little overlap between the two.

Roger, before you put your foot in your mouth any more, I suggest you click on this.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Ken ... =firefox-a

Okay OTB your average strong club player, would probably have no problem beating your average computer geek with a proper knowledge of chess most of the time, but the kicker is, nearly all of the strongest club players will get beaten by ordinary home PC's running free software obtainable over the 'net.

Don't get me wrong, any human weight lifter will get beaten by an elephant, or a rampant forklift, but this does not mean weightlifting is not a fine sport.

Chess is a sport and a mathematical science.

[MSoszynski]

Why doesn't ChessBase support Linux? Because it's uneconomic for them to do so.

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3189

[PeterTurland]

Why doesn't ChessBase support Linux? Because it's uneconomic for them to do so.

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3189

Right on the money, the only morality is, does it make money?

Also its antithesis, if it don't make money it is immoral.

Which begs the question why are professional chess players in the UK so poor?

[Roger de Coverly]

Roger, before you put your foot in your mouth any more, I suggest you click on this.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Ken ... =firefox-a

I don't see the relative non-use of linux by chess players has anything to do with Ken Thompson who as everyone who knows something of the history of computing "invented" unix (and tablebases).

but the kicker is, nearly all of the strongest club players will get beaten by ordinary home PC's running free software obtainable over the 'net.

That is essentially irrelevant. At the higher end, you use a chess database to find out what and how your next opponent plays. From that you deduce some likely positions that might arise during the game. You investigate these both by reference to what has been played before and what the engine of your choice might suggest.

The computer is a gadget which enables this to happen. If it ran on your smart phone, you would use that. With a bit of hacking I don't think that's very far away - There may already be an Android version of scid.

[Ian Kingston]

Open source vs. money is a red herring. It's certainly not a moral issue. Many companies make large amounts of money from open source software - Red Hat is the obvious one. I'm sure that ChessBase would happily go open source and give away their software for free if they could make more money by selling support services - a common model in the open source world.

As mentioned in another thread, there is a free, open source, multi-platform alternative to Chessbase: Scid. I suspect that the vast majority of players would find Scid just as useful as ChessBase.

Competition for chess engines like Fritz and Rybka is intense. Stockfish and Houdini seem to be top dogs at the moment, with the latter supposedly outperforming Rybka. Both are free; Stockfish is open source, but I'm not sure about Houdini.

As usual (there are exceptions), moaning about closed source software is counter-productive. Find the open source versions and use those instead.

[Paolo Casaschi]

Why doesn't ChessBase support Linux? Because it's uneconomic for them to do so.

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3189

Right on the money, the only morality is, does it make money?

Also its antithesis, if it don't make money it is immoral.

No need to enter a debate about morality.
For someone developing software is a funny hobby, so that you can do open source software and give it away for free.
For someone else is a profession and is supposed to pay the house mortgage.

If you are so keen on open source you can write your open source chess server yourself, make clients available for free for any operating system (also the ones you dislike, please) and make sure you cover all main chess events on your server with live comments from professional GMs. Why do you expect ChessBase to do it for you? Why dont you do it for everyone else?

PS: you are actually lucky... most of the work has been done for you already, there is open source code available for a frechess.org like server and plenty of clients. Only issue with freechess.org is the lack of (paid) professional GM available to share their comments on live events, maybe you could concentrate your work on that.

[PeterTurland]

Why doesn't ChessBase support Linux? Because it's uneconomic for them to do so.

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3189

Right on the money, the only morality is, does it make money?

Also its antithesis, if it don't make money it is immoral.

No need to enter a debate about morality.
For someone developing software is a funny hobby, so that you can do open source software and give it away for free.
For someone else is a profession and is supposed to pay the house mortgage.

If you are so keen on open source you can write your open source chess server yourself, make clients available for free for any operating system (also the ones you dislike, please) and make sure you cover all main chess events on your server with live comments from professional GMs. Why do you expect ChessBase to do it for you? Why dont you do it for everyone else?

PS: you are actually lucky... most of the work has been done for you already, there is open source code available for a frechess.org like server and plenty of clients. Only issue with freechess.org is the lack of (paid) professional GM available to share their comments on live events, maybe you could concentrate your work on that.

I use FICS all the while, I've been a member for years and yes it is platform independent, I started out using ICC, which unless you are a titled player you pay for, but again it is platform independent.

It is not so much that I dislike Chessbase, more that I dislike it that many companies try to force you to use Windows, I dual boot, because the computer I bought, had Windows on it already, but I rarely use it because it makes me feel like I'm sleeping with a woman that I might catch something from.

If Chessbase were platform independent, I would try paying for an account with them.

Bit of info I only found out the other week is, when you buy a new computer, as long as you don't boot into Windows and boot up with a live Linux disk instead and install over the top of Windows, it states in the Microsoft EULA, that they will refund the licence fee.

Story here.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/19 ... ux_refund/

[Paolo Casaschi]

If Chessbase were platform independent, I would try paying for an account with them.

One (distant) day, you might have to open your wallet, if they ever make this to work
http://www.chesslive.de/playchess/

Still does not really work even on windows, might work on MacOS same as on windows; I would not count on getting it to work immediately on moonlight/linux, but they might eventually get there.
Again, not the most desirable choice of technology, but it might eventually get you to connect to playchess with a Mac and with Linux.