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)
Some format documentation:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160329061708/http://rybkaforum...
http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_view=threads&...
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.
German spelling bees only last one round
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.)
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.
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.
Ironically, the word you quoted contains spelling errors.