[HN Gopher] ChessBase and Stockfish end their legal dispute
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ChessBase and Stockfish end their legal dispute
Author : tantrum
Score : 159 points
Date : 2022-11-19 03:34 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stockfishchess.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (stockfishchess.org)
| ghostway wrote:
| go stockfish!
| danielvf wrote:
| Summary of the legal settlement:
|
| 1. One more year in which ChessBase cannot use stockfish.
|
| 2. After a year, they may use it, provided they are in compliance
| with GPL-3
|
| 3. ChessBase will never again distribute stockfish without
| obeying the GPL-3
|
| 4. If they don't, the fines and penalties go to the Free Software
| Foundation Europe
|
| 5. Notices on Chessbase website for a year about this settlement
|
| 6. Cooordinated amicable press release
|
| 7. Chessbase has to have a "Free Software Compliance Officer"
|
| 8. From now on, Chessbase must make truthful comparisons agains
| stockfish, must open source neural weights, must certify
| compliance with GPT-3.
|
| 9. This lawsuit is over and resolved
|
| 10. Everyone pays their own legal bills.
|
| Full text, two pages:
| tromp wrote:
| > 10. Everyone pays their own legal bills.
|
| This is the surprising one to me. Making Chessbase pay for
| Stockfish's incurred legal fees not only seems justified but
| would help deter future infringement of open source licences.
| conorcleary wrote:
| Surprising to see, but seems to make for a better future
| relationship. It's a game.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Yes but...
|
| That often leads a dirty game. Litigation, especially license
| and IP related litigation, is often all about the meta, the
| strategy games and ulterior or adjacent motives.
|
| The legal action itself, with associated costs and stresses
| can be scarier than the judgment. Deterrence or establishing
| legal cases and such can be the motive. Legal costs can be
| driven up to strategically raise stakes. Etc. It's nice when
| occasionally the system can be used to settle disputes or do
| justice.
| dcow wrote:
| I also wonder about ChessBase's financials. If the costs
| were too damaging then ChessBase might have to shut down
| which ultimately isn't good for StockFish. It's possible
| ChessBase will sadly lose many customers because of the GPL
| (though it shouldn't be so) because some people in our
| industry and especially companies are allergic to it.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| > If the costs were too damaging then ChessBase might
| have to shut down which ultimately isn't good for
| StockFish.
|
| Why not? It's not like ChessBase ever contributed
| anything to StockFish.
|
| > It's possible ChessBase will sadly lose many customers
| because of the GPL (though it shouldn't be so) because
| some people in our industry and especially companies are
| allergic to it.
|
| ChessBase sells B2C chess engines, not libraries. Their
| customer base is either pro-GPL or don't care about it.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| Most probably a crap lawyer - 90% of "lawyers" posses a
| single skill - to convince the poor soul using their
| services, that such a "deal" is advantageous.
| solarengineer wrote:
| "must certify compliance with GPT-3."
|
| Did you mean "must certify compliance with GPL-3." ?
| gpderetta wrote:
| No no, they literally have to use GPT-3 to write their
| compliance documents.
| gnrlst wrote:
| Prompt: A legal document between Stockfish and ChessBase,
| many pages, great grammar, award winning, breathtaking,
| groundbreaking, superb, outstanding
| dalbasal wrote:
| Way tangent but... NLP prompts remind me of websearch
| circa altavista.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I've been adapting to using the address bar bookmark
| search in Firefox, and ... I never thought I'd find
| myself writing Aliexpress-style product (page) titles.
| "ChessBase GmbH [commercial] and the Stockfish team
| [stockfish.org] reach an [GPL3 AGPL enforcement
| compliance lawsuit settlement] agreement and end their
| legal dispute - Stockfish - [FSF FSFE free software OSI]
| Open Source Chess Engine"
| bluecalm wrote:
| I am not surprised they didn't want to spend their time on
| litigation.
|
| It's sad though there is no consequences for ChessBase. They got
| a double shot: use someone's else code ignoring the licence and
| the worst that could happen to you if you're caught is you comply
| with the license. Not a happy precedent this one.
| conorcleary wrote:
| There's a list of consequences. They revolve around admitting
| to fault publicly and committing to supporting & following the
| licensing agreements.
| InGoodFaith wrote:
| If the worst is a public mea culpa and following the
| agreements you should've done in the first place, that barely
| seems like a deterrent to infringe the license.
|
| Might as well create a crawler bot on github and slurp up all
| the GPL/AGPL for your new AI-coding startup, iterate fast,
| make profit, then pay a pittance in legal fees and a small
| "We're sorry".
| zdragnar wrote:
| The fines and penalties are deferred. If they violate the
| agreement again, they pay. They're basically on the
| equivalent of probation, which is what the plaintiffs
| wanted in the first place.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > Might as well create a crawler bot on github and slurp up
| all the GPL/AGPL for your new AI-coding startup, iterate
| fast, make profit
|
| This has already been done.[1]
|
| 1. https://copilot.github.com/
| jesprenj wrote:
| What does this mean in practice. Is there a tl;dr; of the outcome
| PDF?
|
| Did the sued company release their software under GPL?
| gjm11 wrote:
| The article itself summarizes the outcome and is only four
| paragraphs long.
|
| ChessBase (1) are no longer offering for sale "Fat Fritz 2" and
| "Houdini" (which contain GPL code from Stockfish), (2)
| undertake only ever to distribute those products or any others
| based on Stockfish under the terms of the GPL (which in
| particular means making source code available), and (3) are
| going to have a "Free Software Compliance Officer" and a
| website on which they list products of theirs that make use of
| free and open-source software, and provide whatever downloads
| they are required to. Their licence to distribute Stockfish
| code at all gets reinstated in one year; until then the only
| thing they're allowed to do is to provide downloads to
| customers who have already bought Fat Fritz 2 or Houdini, on
| GPL-compliant terms.
| jesprenj wrote:
| Thank you! Are they are using Stockfish pro bono for existing
| customers, or is it under GPL?
| yewenjie wrote:
| Nice to see the case resolved in about a year. I expected there
| to be some monetary damages to fund the Stockfish project or
| something. However, maybe that cannot be done in free software
| projects.
| porphyra wrote:
| > Finally, the Stockfish team, unpaid hobbyists that all prefer
| coding over litigating, did not seek damages or other forms of
| financial compensation.
|
| These people really are saints.
|
| Anyway, although ChessBase has had some transgressions in the
| past, it does appear that they have turned over a new leaf so
| this seems good for free software all around.
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(page generated 2022-11-19 23:01 UTC)