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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 w
by danielvf 4y ago
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 4y ago> 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 4y agoSurprising to see, but seems to make for a better future relationship. It's a game.
- dalbasal 4y agoYes 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 4y agoI 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 4y ago> 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.
- dcow 4y agoBecause maybe it’s validating as a project to know a large commercial entity uses your code? Maybe the exposure Stockfish gets if ChessBase complies with their requests is worth making sure they can continue to survive? Maybe Stockfish is delighted that their project reaches so many users and is focused on making sure that remains so?
- luciusdomitius 4y agoMost 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 4y ago"must certify compliance with GPT-3." Did you mean "must certify compliance with GPL-3." ?
- gpderetta 4y agoNo no, they literally have to use GPT-3 to write their compliance documents.
- gnrlst 4y agoPrompt: A legal document between Stockfish and ChessBase, many pages, great grammar, award winning, breathtaking, groundbreaking, superb, outstanding
- dalbasal 4y agoWay tangent but... NLP prompts remind me of websearch circa altavista.
- mananaysiempre 4y agoI’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”