So is there just a really big rule book? How is legality decided?
- 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.
This is a win for crony capitalist practices in software, signalling: don't worry your profits are protected!
Disgusting.
Why not the legal fees, at least?
The potential fees are also capped and reasonably easy to know in advance.
German court. Someone will probably correct me on this, but I seem to recall that in Germany legal fees are typically not covered.
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
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.
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.
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)
