Win for Open-Source Legally: Settlement Reached in Stockfish vs. ChessBase | Hacker News Reader

Win for Open-Source Legally: Settlement Reached in Stockfish vs. ChessBase

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89 pointsnew2yc30 comments

This isn't a win for open source. As much as I'd like it to be, settlements do nothing for open source aside from maybe give hope to others that the Defendant's felt the need to settle rather than try to argue the legality of their position in court. Winning in court has different meanings. Usually a settlement can be considered a win for the Plaintiff and Defendant together, and prevents more costly litigation for them but does nothing to help people in similar positions when it comes to case law.

arguably winning a settlement like this is worse than doing nothing as it has minimal fangs and no direct benefit - but you’re out the hassle, time, fees, lawyer costs…

Exactly. This is really nastly. The good guys "win", but the bad guys made money off the good guys and they are not even required to pay them the profits...

This is a win for crony capitalist practices in software, signalling: don't worry your profits are protected!

Disgusting.

This case was brought in a German court. There is no case law in Germany - decisions do usually not bind other courts, even lower courts (unless you're at the highest possible level, Bundesgerichtshof or the constitutional court). This settlement comes with pretty harsh conditions and pointing to it can be useful as a deterrence.

>There is no case law in Germany - decisions do usually not bind other courts, even lower courts

So is there just a really big rule book? How is legality decided?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)

By a law, so by a really big rule book. Laws need to be written and brought into effect by the legislature.

Courts only interpret laws, they can’t make one (except for the constitutional court that can make decisions with law-like quality that have direct binding effect)

Now, lawyers and courts often look at how other courts decided in similar cases and point to those decisions and the legal reasoning laid out by the court, but it is common that even even the higher levels of courts disagree on a subject.

Even higher court decisions have no binding effect in other cases to other courts, including lower courts. It’s not uncommon that lower courts diverge from decisions of their direct appeal courts - the Landgericht Hamburg is pretty notorious for having its decisions in press matters regularly overturned on appeal.

Versus the bias of one judge colouring how law should be decided? Judges are supposed to interpret the law, not create it. A strong legislative framework and collaborative atmosphere between the legal and political communities should remove the need for something like case law.

That already exists. Higher courts decisions then become considerations on appeal. Usually the decisions aren't just biased either but based on previous congressional rules and law, but there are a lot of times where congresses rules are ambiguous or lacking and has become so ineffective that justices have no choice but to make a ruling or leave people vulnerable.

Case law still exists in civil law systems. But it is merely persuasive, unlike in common law systems that have a binding case law.

- Giving attribution to the source, e.g., by confuscating a GPL copy into the manual, when you are making the most money in the chess 'product' scene on a ripped Stockfish, is the least they could have done.

- Chessbase's CEO on their official blog (now deleted) stated that they developed the engine from scratch. They also took a newer version for ripoff and compared it to an older version of Stockfish to claim their Fat Fritz 2/Houdini 6 engines are powerful.

- However lousy their terms are, free software licenses are enforceable by law. It will set an example. Since we are on the topic of chess, a threat is always more assertive than execution. Big tech joined FOSS forces for one simple reason - they could lose more than they could win.

- Stockfish did not suffer significant monetary damage since they don't have a commercial product people already insinuated that there would be no extraordinary financial settlement.

> need to settle than argue the legality It is a vague and circumstantial argument. In practical terms, since it's already been ~1.5 years, a settlement (1-year leverage + entire credit + foss.chessbase.com + GPL enforcement) is enough for the plaintiff. Also, the only time the defendant in a lawsuit agrees to settle out of court is when they expect the trial to be more expensive than the settlement. Generally, this happens when the plaintiff's case is so strong that the defendant is confident the plaintiff will win in court. I agree with the no-one-sided landslide victory; that's what settlement means. Would you not say, given the settlement terms, Stockfish (GPL enforcement) won? The entire open-source community base those enforcements.

I see this as an absolute win.

Plus, some money would be even better. Agreed.

> Critically, the agreement includes no financial compensation for the Stockfish team, not even legal fees.

Why not the legal fees, at least?

> The parties are involved in the litigation before the District Court Munich I, Case No. 42 0 9765/21

German court. Someone will probably correct me on this, but I seem to recall that in Germany legal fees are typically not covered.

It depends. Settlements can stipulate anything. If you loose in court, you usually have to pay the winners legal fees, but the cap is what's laid out in the Rechtsanwaltsvergütungsgesetz and depends on the value of the dispute and other factors (how complicated the legal matter, ...). The winning party would still need to pay the share above that.

If you loose/win partially, the court decides on the share of cost that each party will need to pay.

The difference to the US system is that the potential costs of loosing a case can be determined pretty well in advance and that the other side cannot threaten to rack up infinite costs by racking up lawyer hours.

> edit: corrected the spelling of Rechtsanwaltsvergütungsgesetz

> Rechtsanwaltvergütungsgesetzt

German spelling bees only last one round

Up until 2004 it was the Bundesrechtsanwaltsgebührenordnung, so it did get easier (and I still misspelled it. no points for me)

Spelling bees aren’t really a thing in Germany, I think mostly because German language is too regular and not idiosyncratic enough when it comes to spelling (unlike English) to make those interesting.

Learning correct spelling is still important and still a skill that has to be taught, so I don’t want to chalk it all up to that.

Especially compound nouns like that one you quoted, however, that are just constructed from very simple German words (no loan words) are usually no problem when it comes to spelling.

I’m fact, my own spelling troubles as a native German speaker are mostly limited to some loan words and grammatical issues. I always struggle with which preposition to pick („dem“ or „den“) because I never properly learned to think about cases.

(There actually is a spelling mistake in that word, though. The “t” in the end is not correct.)

There are actually at least two spelling errors in that word - there’s an “s” missing as well: Rechtsanwalt_s_vergütungsgesetz.

In my defense, typing this on a mobile phone with (english) autocorrect interference makes it harder. In their defense - they copied and pasted my earlier spelling error in the text, so they’re not to blame.

I think spelling bees are a thing pretty unique to the English language. In most languages you can infer spelling from pronunciation (and the other way around) with high certainty. Of course, any living language is complicated and has its share of rules and exceptions, but usually only enough to cover in the first couple school years, not enough to make it interesting to run spelling competitions.

When I lived in China, I once participated in a company activity day that included some team games.

One of the games was similar to a spelling bee: the facilitator said a word out loud, and each team had to try to write it correctly on a flipchart.

There are many thousands of Chinese characters. So, even though the folks in my team were smart enough to be FAANG engineers, and were young enough not to have forgotten everything they learned at school+university, there was a lot of head-scratching and second-guessing going on.

It's easy to spell, as are most German words. It's just a lot of letters.

Ironically, the word you quoted contains spelling errors.

Fair. And, yes: spelling bees make no sense in a phonetic language. It really is an English thing.

Yes. And German isn't even the most phonetic language I speak. That would be Croatian, where even loanwords are spelled phonetically, which isn't the case in German.

I have not followed this saga at all but for individuals, legal fees are also usually covered by insurance in Germany (I'm assuming this applies for the stockfish team). So, assuming they have legal insurance (which is quite common) it'll be covered by that.

The potential fees are also capped and reasonably easy to know in advance.

HN posting: Win for Open-Source Legally: Settlement Reached in Stockfish vs. ChessBase

Title of article: Settlement Reached in Stockfish v ChessBase

Was the title edited, or is this editorialism? Also:

> The agreement also includes the necessity to hire a Free Software Compliance Officer to assure that further violations do not occur. Critically, the agreement includes no financial compensation for the Stockfish team, not even legal fees. There are fines for violating the settlement, but they would be paid to the Free Software Foundation Europe and not the Stockfish team.

Wow, what a bunch of fraudsters. Does chessbase have a lot of cachet in the chess community?

Yes. Every single serious chess master uses Chessbase as it has the largest database available out there even though the price is pretty obscene. The customer base is more dedicated than most and it's probably the single most important tool a chess pro can get outside of an engine itself.

Edit: It may not be the single largest database, I suspect that honor goes to Chess.com or Lichess, but it is certainly the largest curated one.

It’s not even about the database per se… what’s not easily replicated are the annotated (commented/analyzed) games, high quality metadata.

This actual software, in terms of UI, is basically shit, and the technology is questionable (search really should be an order faster - my understanding is it has to do a full sequential read of the main DB (which is several GB)

Oh, the software is absolutely awful, and you're spot on about the metadata (and the CBH format as a whole,) but I would also toss in another point where it's (sadly) the best: Opening prep. There just isn't much else that can compare despite the awful interface.

Depends on what you're searching for. For position lookup, there's an index; for something like a given player, it's likely to be a linear scan.

Some format documentation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160329061708/http://rybkaforum...

http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_view=threads&...

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