Well, I am not so sure. You might be happy with one particular Stockfish compile (e.g. a Windows .exe), which you provide yourself.syzygy wrote:As long as your exe contains no Stockfish code, it cannot infringe the copyright on Stockfish and so the GPL does not apply.Ovyron wrote:Suppose I implement some Learning Algorithm in Stockfish, but I don't want to open the source, because I want to keep my Algorithm secret.
Apparently, releasing the engine would be against the Licence Agreement.
So what if I release some other exe that when it's run, it patches Stockfish and makes it have learning?
Note this isn't very different from releasing a closed source Stockfish, because I'd be giving people the option of turning their Stockfishes into learning Stockfishes at home, so that they end up with a closed source Stockfish, just as if I gave them to them on the first place.
But doing it this way would be fine?
But it seems to me the idea will not work very well. If your exe patches the Stockfish source code, any user of your exe will be free to distribute that source code including your changes.
So you would have to make an exe that patches a particular Stockfish compile. But that is practically impossible to do. (It may be possible if your learning code has almost no interaction with the SF search code, but then you could as well implement learning in the GUI instead.)
I am also not so certain about your statement that people who would patch the source code with the aid of a program they bought would be free to distribute it. The code that this patching program inserts would not be theirs. They are just licensed to use it , as buyers of the patching program. That the program inserts it into Stockfish doesn't make it GPL, it only makes it illegal for them to distribute the patched version. But that is fine as long as they don't start distributing the binaries.