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Comment by FlyingAvatar | Hacker News Reader

The GPL's Termination clause allows Stockfish to terminate ChessBase's use of the license, but does anything prevent someone from forking the code and licensing it to Stockfish as an end around? It seems like it would be very difficult to enforce.

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Forking the code doesn't fork the copyright ownership. Stockfish still owns the code under their copyright regardless of whether it lives in their repository or in some fork of their codebase.

A forked project doesn't have the right to grant people licenses to code which they don't own.

Licences can give the right to sublicense under the same terms. But the GPL does not, and each licensor gets the licence directly from the copyright holder.

That explains it perfectly, thank you. It also raises interesting questions about the metaphysics of copyright/intellectual property

Regardless, you can't sublicense a license you don't hold (anymore).

Thanks for making me stop and think twice about this.

Very good point.

Stockfish still holds the copyright. You’re using their code with their license, and so does everybody you share that code with.

That would be a separate infringement. Once Stockfish wins their case against ChessBase, it would likely mean easier wins on any other infringement cases.

The viral nature of the GPL and other copyleft licenses expressly allow this and put a healthy fear of improper OSS reuse and deployment in most rational software companies.

Please, please, stop calling it "viral". Thank you.

The copy would be a derivative of Stockfish, and (IIUC) (NOTALAWYER) I believe by terminating ChessBase's use of the license directly they would also prevent ChessBase from using a derivative product. It shouldn't be any harder to enforce than any other copyright violation (and I'd bet the court would not be amused by ChessBase trying to do an end-run around their license issues by introducing a third party.

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