Relationship between ChessDB and Scid or scid-pg from Pascal Georoges.

Background

Following my registration of ChessDB on Sourceforge on the 13th December 2006 and some postings to the Scid mailing list, Pascal Georges offered me some source code. Initially things looked promising, with a co-developer joining the ChessDB effort. However, things did not work out as I would have hoped. The working relationship deteriorated quickly, so Pascal decided to create his fork. He has since written a web page slandering me , which is why I have wrote this one, to express my point of view. (He has also done his best to my email address spammed, as you will see later).

Take-over of the Scid web site - denied by Sourceforge

Pascal made an application to Sourceforge to take control of the Shane Hudson's Scid website on Sourceforge and posted his intensions on the Scid mailing list. I felt this was inappropriate for several reasons and expressed my concerns.

I was not the only one to object to Pascal's attempt to gain control of the Scid web site. The was an objection from Michael Rudolf (authorised by Shane as a developer of Scid) another from Jeremy White, and Detlef Steuer. There was only one person who felt Pascal should have been able to take over Shane's web site, but numerous who objected. Pascal was denied the takeover by Sourceforge, so set up the project scid-pg on the domain free.fr.

Pascal's Early releases of scid-pg

Pascal released his first version of scid-pg on the 1^st January 2007, in a file named scid-3.6.1-pg.1.tgz This was two weeks after the first release of ChessDB, which was version chessdb-3.6.2, released on the 15th December 2006. See the downloads page on Sourceforge

My main critisims of Pascal Georges

I have several reasons to fill irritated by Pascal's actions, which fall into 3 catagories

He plagerises my code - I can prove this. It has also been acknowledged by several others who have investigated this. Some have gone public about this. Others have emailed me privately about this too.
He is a liar - I can prove this. Again, someone else has called him a liar over this.
He has has attempted to attract as much spam as possible to two of my email addresses, by writing my email address in a way that spambots could easily get my email addresses, but disguising his own on the same web page. I can prove this.

Lets now look at this is more detail

Plagiarism

Pascal was irritated Sourceforge had denied him access to the Scid web site, and made various posts about his irritation. One of which included this paragraph (my choice of highlighted words)

So I will switch naming of my releases from scid-pg to scid as I have the right to. As chessDB is a fork of Scid (2004), and until anybody else is better placed than me to continue Scid, I request things to be strictly separated : given Kirkby's attitude, I hope he'll be honest enough to continue his fork in a strict separated way than mine : I deny him the right to use my own code, as I'll never use his own code (I never heard of a forking project whose that was in conflict with the mainline take code from the original).

Scid was licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Any attempt to deny me the right to use his code is expressly forbidden in the GPL. But Pascal's claim that as I'll never use his own code was a lie - Pascal actually just lies all the time. In fact, Pascal had taken code from ChessDB - hundreds of lines of it. I have never bothered to identify all the code that Pascal copied, but a few examples of where messages are copied, complete with my occasioonal spelling or grammer error.

Pascal's Scid/Scid-pg, which supposedly uses no code from ChessDB, printed when it started up
Shane is NOT reponsible for bugs in Scid
This sentence made no sense, as Shane was clearly responsible for bugs in Scid. I soon released that a line I had written
Shane is NOT reponsible for bugs in ChessDB
Pascal had simply copied my code, but changed ChessDB to Scid - complete with my spelling mistake (reponsible instead of responsible)! If we put one line above the other, we see:
Shane is NOT reponsible for bugs in ChessDB
Shane is NOT reponsible for bugs in Scid
Do they not look similar? Would you agree Pascal is wrong to write Shane is not responsible for bugs in Scid, when Shane wrote it?
I have made a lot of effort to impove upon the documentation from Shane's Scid, so put a revised tutorial on the web. The very first release of ChessDB printed when it stated up:
Also look at the online tutorial http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ will always have the very latest
This is not good English I am the first to admit, but I'm rather glad I made that error, as you will see. Pascals code by comparision says:
Also look at the online tutorial http://scid.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ will always have the very latest
Putting the lines from ChessDB and the line from Pascal's code, one above the other, we see a remarkable simularity:
http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ will always have the very latest
http://scid.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ will always have the very latest
If you check the online tutorial at the http://scid.sourceforge.net/tutorial, you will see it is over 4 years old (dated December 2003). So why did Pascal plagiarised version of Scid print a message saying it had the latest information? The line is not in the real Scid from Shane Hudson. Simple - the plageriast Pascal Georges simply copied the line from ChessDB, changing chessdb to scid! (Pascal of course had no way to change the tutorial on the real Scid web site).
In fact, Pascal has never made any attempt to improve the tutorial - he believes in quantities of changes, rather than quality, which is why he has released versions which corrupt peoples databases - a bug I consider of the most serious kind.
Look at his ChangeLog.old. That is *exactly* the same as ChangeLog in ChessDB, which was published before Pascal. A copy of the ChangeLog of ChessDB, complete with a time-stamp of Tue Dec 26 19:37:27 2006, can be seen on the Sourceforge web site.

The plageriast had simply renamed my file from ChangeLog to ChangeLog.old. I don't object to this as such, but do when he denies it. He was obviously unaware I had written that. No such file with that name exists in the real Scid, from Shane Hudson.
The original Scid had move announcements, but there was no file for the word check. I added one to ChessDB, which was simply copied, with no acknowledgement.
Other changes I made, based on code on the web at the scid-3.6b1.tar.bz2 are included, with no acknowledgement. In fact, I don't think Pascal Georges even knew there were there - despite the fact they were documented in my code. A list of my changes can be found at http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/Scid/index.php.en
Changes I made to remove compiler warnings from the file src/position.cpp have been copied. Feel free to compare the file src/position.cpp from ChessDB, to that of Shanes and Pascals version. Pascals is simply a copy of mine.
Some parts of Shane's Scid has dates in it, so one could list games at specific dates. These were too old. I changed those. Pascal simply copied my changes.
The original Scid could catagorise games into a number of Elo ratings. I enchanced the range of these, but these too were copied.
etc etc etc. Pascal simply started with the code from ChessDB and copied it all, complete with my spelling mistakes and bad grammer in places!.

Pascal George's Nasty Trick of Getting My E-mail Addressed Spammed

Although I was aware of Pascal's web page about me, I was unaware of a trick of his to attract me spam, until Guy Macon pointed this out to me 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:pgeorges@users.sourceforge.net or mailto:pascal.georges1@free.fr

So not content with writing lies about me, Pascal also tried to get as much spam as possible sent to my two email addresses!

Summary

This is my understanding of the situation.

I started ChessDB
Pascal joined me for a while, but I decided not to add Pascal's changes, as I was concerned about quality.
Pascal takes code I'd written, puts it into a project he calles scid-pg, without a word of acknowledgedment.
Pascal denies he has used my code, despite evidence to the contary.
He tells lots of lies about me.
He writes a web page in a way to attract spam to my two of my email addreses, whilst writing his own in a way which will not get spam.

Website administered by Dr. David Kirkby
This page was last modified: September 16, 2007. 10:41:20 am GMT