ChessBase and Stockfish end their legal dispute | Hacker News Reader

ChessBase and Stockfish end their legal dispute

stockfishchess.org

166 pointstantrum24 comments

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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 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:

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Because 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?

Surprising to see, but seems to make for a better future relationship. It's a game.

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.

"must certify compliance with GPT-3."

Did you mean "must certify compliance with GPL-3." ?

No no, they literally have to use GPT-3 to write their compliance documents.

Prompt: A legal document between Stockfish and ChessBase, many pages, great grammar, award winning, breathtaking, groundbreaking, superb, outstanding

Way tangent but... NLP prompts remind me of websearch circa altavista.

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”

> 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.

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.

There's a list of consequences. They revolve around admitting to fault publicly and committing to supporting & following the licensing agreements.

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".

> 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/

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.

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.

What does this mean in practice. Is there a tl;dr; of the outcome PDF?

Did the sued company release their software under GPL?

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.

Thank you! Are they are using Stockfish pro bono for existing customers, or is it under GPL?

go stockfish!

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