Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:Using the GPL for small projects is in effect equivalent to releasing your work to the public domain. Not from a legal point of view. I mean from a practical point of view.
It depends on what the author does. If he doesn't do anything, which is the typical case, the GPL is just there to annoy law-abiding people who wanted to make good use of the code but can't follow the GPL, so it is in fact a very harmful license: it hampers lawful people and helps criminals.
Many programs are put under the GPL when the author in fact meant something entirely different. Stockfish appears to be one of those programs.
If you do not plan to enforce your license, there is no point in putting one.
Both the statement you quoted and your reply are lacking the distinction between the two worlds we are discussing: the "chess engine published under GPL" world and the "GPL software published in the AppStore" world, where the latter is just one current example of a commercial place selling software while putting certain restrictions on it.
In the first world, choosing the GPL is just perfectly okay, even for Stockfish. I am quite confident that the SF team will continue to pursue cases of violation of their copyrights, and of the GPL as far as SF is concerned, the same way as I think they have already done in the past.
I agree that it is indeed necessary to be willing to pursue such cases, otherwise the GPL might turn out not to have been the best choice.
The second world is different, and causes the trouble we are discussing here. While most certainly I believe that illegal copies of a GPL program will be removed from the selling place as soon as the circumstances are made clear to the company operating that place, it is not fully clear to me whether the AppStore rules are really in contradiction to the nature of SF itself, as a GPL program having been published by its original author.
It is possible that the former event of removing GnuGO was only based on a complaint by the FSF, which the FSF most probably would not do on their own but because someone asked them to do so. I do not know the case, so this is of course speculation, but not as absurd as possible IMO.
I doubt that there were anyone who could successfully urge the FSF to complain about Stockfish being sold by Apple in their AppStore. Time will tell, of course.
Nevertheless it is possible that a different license than the GPL could be more appropriate
for Stockfish in the AppStore.
Sven