Guy Macon wrote:

Which is how I feel. Couple that with a web page written about me,
calling me a liar etc:

http://prolinux.free.fr/scid/FAQ.html#fork_insane

and it does rather irritate me.

That's just plain *nasty*! I think anyone reading it will see
at once that it makes him look bad and you look good.

I also noticed that he put your email address on the page in the
clear for spambots to harvest while protecting his own by writing
pgeorges (at) users.sourceforge.net or pascal.georges1 (at) free.fr
instead of mailto or mailto


As you can see, Pascal Georges ( or
) is not the nicest person to deal with and is
certainly the nastiest open-source developer I have ever come across.

I had not actually noted his trick with the email address, in leaving
mine in a form ready for spam bots, but disguising his own. But I guess
given his acts of plagiarism in claiming he wrote code for 'Scid' that
he did not write, I should not be too surprised.

I suspect he might wish he had not committed the acts of plagiarism, but
it is too late for that.

Dr. David Kirkby

On Aug 20, 7:57 am, David Richerby
wrote:
Richard wrote:
Personally, playing in the U1600 sections of tournaments, I'd like
to see statistics on what the most common responses by players rated
1400-1600 are to certain moves in the openings I play. That will
tell me what I really need to prepare for, regardless of how strong
it is.

My guess is that U1600 players play much more randomly than grand-
masters. For example, you can be almost certain that a GM would play
2.d4 after 1.e4 e6. A much weaker player, on the other hand, would be
much more likely to try something like 2.Nc3, 2.Nf3 or 2.e5.

Dave.

While lower rated players are less likely to stick to "book" moves, we
do still play at least somewhat logically. Maybe not so much for
players rated under 1000, but I usually play 1200-1600 players while I
try to get my 1380 rating up to 1600 and beyond. So certain inferior
"non-book" responses are going to be much more common than others.

That's part of the reason why it's hard for intermediate players to
study openings - you memorize a book line and your opponent doesn't
play into it. But most opening books don't bother covering the common
mistakes that no master would make. There's a definite market for that
type of book if some master decided to write it. I know Dan Heisman
has written a little bit of that in his Novice Nook column at
chesscafe.com, but he only covered a few of the most common openings.

For instance, I started playing a new gambit recently, and the first
two times I tried it, both of my opponents declined the gambit with
the same "non-book" response. Luckily, these were slow games, so I had
plenty of time to work out how to get an advantage from this logical
seeming, but ultimately weak move. I ended up with a good position in
the first game that carried through all the way to a dominating middle
game and material advantage in the endgame. The second game was
tougher, because my opponent fought back well in the middle game, but
I managed to win that, too.

My point, though, is that I wasn't prepared for what's obviously a
common response to the opening that I chose, because the sources that
originally showed me the opening (in this case, a friend at a
tournament, followed by reading an article on the internet about it)
didn't think that move was worth bothering to mention.

--Fromper

Guy Macon http://www.guymacon.com/ writes:

[...]

Besides, Scid stands for "Shane's Chess Information Database."
You should call yours Pcid. scid-pg is also a good name.

Donald Knuth asked that any derivative work from TeX would not carry the
TeX name. I find that this should be the norm, culturally. Keeping a
similar name on a derivative work seems to give people the feeling that
the original author still works on that software, which may now be badly
written by someone else. Though this implies cluelessness on people, it
may still give the original author a bad image which is unfair.

So I think that unless the original author has anything to do with a new
derivative work and he endorses it, the name should be very different. I
wouldn't even call it Dcid, if it were mine.

David Richerby wrote:

On the other hand, the trademark owner has to defend his trademark
once he became aware of violations. If a trademark is not defended,
the courts will take the attitude that it is not valuable to the
trademark owner. Since the trademark is not valuable to its owner,
there can be no harm in somebody else using the name.

That's true, and in this case there appears to be nobody defending
the name. Excellent point.

Nothing is trademarked unless you explicitly say that it is.

I just looked ofer the USPTO site looking for that requirement
and could not find it. It says that you can establish rights
in a mark by using the mark or intending to use the mark in
commerce, and it says that you may (not must) use the TM or SM
designation to announce the claim. but
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac...tent.htm#basis
does not mention anything about explicitly saying that it is a
trademark. It simply says "the mark must appear on the goods,
the container for the goods, or displays associated with the
goods, and the goods must be sold or transported in commerce."
It is my (possibly incorrect) understanding that someone can,
by usage, have a trademark by commercial use before he knows
what a trademark is.

Then again, I couldn't find anything saying they *don't* have
to be claimed, and you obviously have to claim that it is a
trademark before you can sue for infringement, but I am fairly
sure that the lawsuit will be decided on who used the mark in
commerce first, not who explicitly claimed that it is a trademark
first. I could be wrong, of course. If you have any wording
from the USPTO or from an applical law, I would be most interested
in reading it.

The question of who owns the Trademark "Linux" is instructive.

Linus Torvalds created Linux in 1991. At that time and for
years afterward he made no trademark claims.

In 1994 one William R. Della Croce Jr. of Boston made what appears
to be the first claim that "Linux" is a trademark, and in 1996
started demanding 10 percent royalties on sales from Linux vendors.

In the resulting lawsuit, R. Della Croce's claim was nullified
and the Linux trademark was legally assigned to Linus Torvalds.
See [ http://www.linuxmark.org/ ].

Especially instructive is the Petition to Cancel filed by
Linus Torvalds and others: [ http://lwn.net/Articles/148228/ ].
Nowhere in that document is there any claim that anyone other
than Croce was the first to claim the trademark, only that it
was in use in commerce long before he did so.

It is my belief that "Linux" became a trademark when the first
dollar changed hands while buying a copy -- even though nobody
at the time explicitly said that it was a trademark.

--
Guy Macon
http://www.guymacon.com/

David Richerby wrote:
Guy Macon http://www.guymacon.com/ wrote:
Pascal wrote:
I am not sure Scid can be associated to a trademark like RedHat,
You can be sure now. I assure you that it's a valid trademark.
Trademarks are established simply by being used.

No, trademarks have to be claimed.

That must be one of the myriad facts about trademark that he's forgotten.

--
Kenneth Sloan
Computer and Information Sciences +1-205-932-2213
University of Alabama at Birmingham FAX +1-205-934-5473
Birmingham, AL 35294-1170 http://www.cis.uab.edu/sloan/

james wrote:

For international registration, the Madrid agreement states that people
can register their trademark at the WIPO (World Intellectual Property
Organisation) if they have already registered in one country which has
signed the Madrid agreement. However, people have to pay for each
country they want a valid registration, turning an international
registration into a very costly process.



In many countries, trademarks are not protected any more if they haven't
been used for a "period of time" (5 years usually), and, as David wrote
in his previous message, they have to be defended, or protection of the
trademark is also lost.


As well it should. Trademarks are usually restricted to a particular
market segment AND a geographic region. If your use is in another
country, or for a product/service that cannot reasonably be confused
with the original, then there is no trademark infringement.

The acid test for trademark is: will the consumer be confused?

There is an interesting example in my area - a local theater company was
using a name that was already in use by a theater in another state. As
long as the theater company remained small and local, there was no
problem - but as soon as the theater company "went regional" and started
advertising in the other company's area, there WAS a conflict, and our
local company had to change names (or...remain forever small and local).

It makes little sense to try to register a trademark in a region in
which you don't do business - and if you DO do business in every
country, the cost of registration in each country is trivial. Paying to
register, and then NOT USING the trademark in a particular country, is
likely to lead to your LOSING the court battle when a conflict arises.

Use it, or lose it.

Note that this is very different from copyright, or patent.

--
Kenneth Sloan
Computer and Information Sciences +1-205-932-2213
University of Alabama at Birmingham FAX +1-205-934-5473
Birmingham, AL 35294-1170 http://www.cis.uab.edu/sloan/

Kenneth Sloan wrote:

That must be one of the myriad facts about trademark that he's forgotten.

Is there a special on ad hominems this week, Kenneth?

Guy Macon wrote:
David Richerby wrote:


On the other hand, the trademark owner has to defend his trademark
once he became aware of violations. If a trademark is not defended,
the courts will take the attitude that it is not valuable to the
trademark owner. Since the trademark is not valuable to its owner,
there can be no harm in somebody else using the name.


That's true, and in this case there appears to be nobody defending
the name. Excellent point.

It is reasonably well known Shane Hudson (original author of Scid) has
been (still is?) seriously ill. Hence Shane has probably not been in a
position to defend the name Scid even if he wanted.

Anyway, I am pleased to see others feel the same way as me. There has
not been a single person here (apart from Pascal Georges ) say they
believe he is right to use the name Scid. There have been numerous
people (I have lost count) who feel he should not be using the name.

To be fair to Pascal, there was one person on the Scid mailing list some
time back who said they felt he should have access to the Scid web site
to use the name Scid. Everyone else who expressed an opinion, felt it
was inappropriate.

I am not aware of anyone ever (apart from Pascal), who has read

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/rec...b9e3c5e4e7266a

express any doubts my claims of plagiarism are true. A few have hinted
they believe they are well founded, but to be fair, nobody has actually
said so.

If anyone (apart from Pascal of course), has read

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/rec...b9e3c5e4e7266a

and believe my claims of plagiarism by Pascal Georges are not
convincing, then please say so and give a brief reason why.

If you have read it and do believe my claims of plagiarism are well
founded, you please say so. It would be appreciated!!!

--
Dave (from the UK)

Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form:
Hitting reply will work for a few months only - later set it manually.

http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/ - a Free open-source Chess Database

Dave from the UK wrote:

I am not aware of anyone ever (apart from Pascal), who has read

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/rec...b9e3c5e4e7266a

express any doubts my claims of plagiarism are true. A few have hinted
they believe they are well founded, but to be fair, nobody has actually
said so.

For the record, I firmly believe that Pascal copied that which was
written by you and claimed that it was his work. My doubts about
plagiarism revolve around whether doing that in the context of the
GPL is actually plagiarism or something that is annoying and
distasteful but allowed.

BTW. I also beleive that Pascal is correct when he says that you
took Scid code, changed the copyright notices, and changed Scid
to ChessDB in various places. In your case I *know* that doing
that is allowed and is even encouraged as being a great way to
make sure that nobody confuses the fork with the original as
they diverge.

--
Guy Macon
http://www.guymacon.com/

21.08.2007 00:22, Guy Macon:
Kenneth Sloan wrote:

That must be one of the myriad facts about trademark that he's forgotten.

Is there a special on ad hominems this week, Kenneth?


The point is, you called yourself as a first class expert in trademark
issues. Telling Pascal you had forgotten more about this topic, than he
ever would learn about it. A quite bold statement. Well, and than you
missed such a basic fact about trademarks. That somebody because of that
comes up with a joke on your cost, was quite inevitable. I didn't write
what Kenneth has written - but I had spontaenously more or less the same
idea, when I read the dialogue between you and David Richerby.

Greetings,
Ralf