Stockfish clones in the AppStore: it's becoming a plague...

[tiger]

The most straight forward way to dis courage this practice is for Tord or anyone else that is concerned to write small reviews about these apps and mention that it is virtually identical to the free StockFish app.Then these developers will be stuck with no revenue and still have to pay the annual registration fee to Apple.

This will not work. For the privilege to write a review you will have to purchase the app first, which you can do only once anyway. So your review will quickly be buried and nobody will care.


// Christophe

[Cubeman]

The most straight forward way to dis courage this practice is for Tord or anyone else that is concerned to write small reviews about these apps and mention that it is virtually identical to the free StockFish app.Then these developers will be stuck with no revenue and still have to pay the annual registration fee to Apple.

This will not work. For the privilege to write a review you will have to purchase the app first, which you can do only once anyway. So your review will quickly be buried and nobody will care.


// Christophe

Hardly any one writes a review any-way, so I can't see it been buried any time soon.Also the warning in the review will lead to less purchases so even more chance that the review will survive.If it is a paid for app then I read most reviews before purchasing.

[Eelco de Groot]

The most straight forward way to dis courage this practice is for Tord or anyone else that is concerned to write small reviews about these apps and mention that it is virtually identical to the free StockFish app.Then these developers will be stuck with no revenue and still have to pay the annual registration fee to Apple.

This will not work. For the privilege to write a review you will have to purchase the app first, which you can do only once anyway. So your review will quickly be buried and nobody will care.


// Christophe

Hardly any one writes a review any-way, so I can't see it been buried any time soon.Also the warning in the review will lead to less purchases so even more chance that the review will survive.If it is a paid for app then I read most reviews before purchasing.

Sorry, I have not followed the discussion but I was just wondering if it is necessary to see all this just from the GPL point of view? If Stockfish was freeware without any GPL license, or even a plain paid app. with any general End User's Licence, regardless, does Apple not have a rule against people hijacking someone else's app. and selling it as their own? It does not look good on Apple if their customers can't be sure they would not be paying for pirated copies for instance. Tord has the authority to withdraw the GPL from any new version, as Fabien Letouzey did with Fruit, if that would change Apple's view of the issue or give Tord more ways of doing something against practices he may not like, then maybe that would be best. Any action against this kind of thing would not be enough to stop outright fraud but this is more "petty fraud". I don't think the GPL is much of a handle here?

The "unfavourable review" measure does not look feasible to me, it is a matter for the Apple store to enforce their own rules if they have them.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

It is very naive to release code under the GPL and assume that the work is safely protected. The author must take responsability and invest time and energy in order to enforce fair use.

I believe that is a fair and accurate summary. Emphasis mine.

Fighting copyright infringement legally is difficult (but not impossible) for "small" teams/people/companies.

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.

[Sven]

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

[Don]

It is very naive to release code under the GPL and assume that the work is safely protected. The author must take responsability and invest time and energy in order to enforce fair use.

I believe that is a fair and accurate summary. Emphasis mine.

Fighting copyright infringement legally is difficult (but not impossible) for "small" teams/people/companies.

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.

Any licence you put on "free" software makes it non-free in some sense as it does restrict the user of the software and puts conditions on how it can be used.

But this probably should be filed under the category, "no good deed goes unpunished" from the viewpoint of the stockfish team.

[hgm]

The fraud is that a buyer could get exactly the same product for free, so the fact to hide that what I am selling is an exact copy of another product available for free it is a fraud IMHO.

You never heard of Canada Bill Jones' motto?

It's Morally Wrong To Allow Suckers To Keep Their Money.

[aturri]

I mainly think Christophe is right.

The case about VLC is very known in the GPL field, and I think GPL is not compatible with the App Store, as Julien has already pointed out.

But I think Tord has an easy way to solve both problems, which are:

1) Current Stockfish licence (GPL) is not compatible with the App Store.

2) It seems Tord doesn't like people making easy money just modifiying few strings and recompiling and selling the "new" program. Probably even if it would also follow estrictly the GPL license terms (that is, including the full changed code and/or linking the site to download it)

These two problems can be solved just CHANGING the current LICENCE of the new versions being uploaded to the App Store.

Tord is the author, so he can change the GPL licence (if he is, or them are, the author(s) of all the code present in Stockfish)

For example, he could just close the versions to be sent to App Store, and keep the GPL for the PC versions. Or try another licence that avoids the commercial profit, but he should choose one compatible with the App Store: look at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

I take this opportunity to thank Tord for publishing the great program Stockfish under the GPL terms.

(EDIT: grammatical correction)

[aturri]

Obviously all the above does not prevent programs continue using the code already released under the GPL on previous versions. Neither could prevent another developer was taking the improvements in PC versions and adapt to Android or IOS.

You could avoid those versions being distributed on the App Store denouncing they use a GPL license, incompatible with the App Store agreement, but it remains to be seen whether Apple would erase those applications. Recall that in the case of VLC, were the developers themselves who withdrew their program.

In short, there is no easy solution if the authors don't like the current situation.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

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.

"As they have already done in the past"? You mean they enforce their copyright? Did I miss anything?

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.

I can't find your argument, if you are attempting to make one.

The original authors can do what they want and the GPL is not even relevant to them for that, because they already have the right to redistribute their own code. Unlike everyone else, they do not have to agree to the license to get the redistribution rights.

What they do in terms of distribution is completely irrelevant to the discussion, legally and logically.

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.

The FSF does not own the copyright on Stockfish. Apple is free to ignore them completely. (Besides being bad for marketing, anyway).

The only person that can stop the abuse are the authors. If the authors don't care or don't want to do anything, nothing will happen. See: Fruit-Rybka.