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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

>Due to Chessbase’s repeated license violations, leading developers of Stockfish have terminated their GPL license with ChessBase permanently. However, ChessBase is ignoring the fact that they no longer have the right to distribute Stockfish, modified or unmodified, as part of their products.

Can they just do that? How can software really be considered free if the maker can later take away your permission to use it?

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The copyright holder can choose to do that only after violations have occurred (and choose to permanently terminate the license even after curing the violation). See the verbatim quote from GPL3 in my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897105

GPL and other copy-left licenses work in that way. If StockFish was MIT licensed before, then ChessBase can use the latest version with that license. They could even fork the repo at that point and continue developing. If StockFish was always GPL, then the license can be terminated.

See Section 8 of the GPLv3, "termination". https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

Reading that, I don't see anything about the copyright holder being able to manually terminate a license. Rather the copyright holder can notify a party that is violating other sections of the GPL3, and then the party can either remedy those violations or lose their license to use the software.

Is ChessBase violating the GPL3?

EDIT: oh, I should read the article. They are saying ChessBase modified the GPL software then redistributed it without the original attribution or copyright.

The termination clause has always existed in the GPL, including the specific ways it can come into effect. It's the teeth of the GPL.

Has the GPL ever really been tested in a US court?

My non-expert impression has been that open source licenses and "licenses" that aren't ... explicit contractual agreements between parties (i.e. not just click through or some text in a download) do not have a particularly strong backing with law or case law. Whether or not you "can or can't" do something with regards to effectively making up rules that will be enforced by courts with a blob of text in source code or a check boxes on websites is still somewhat up in the air (somebody who knows things feel free to correct my impressions).

Please note that without any license, the default in the US would be all rights reserved for the copyright holder, and thus does not permit you to redistribute without author's permission. Therefore, that particular argument alone (without some additional fair use or other claim) would likely not fly in court in the violator's favor (i.e. if you did not agree to the GPL attached to it, which license did you think you have that permitted you to redistribute the copyrighted work?)

Indeed.

"Your honor, the defendant is distributing my copyrighted work without a license. Make him stop please."

Most lawyers who read the GPL are not excited to go to court. They will advise you are settle without going to court. Lawyers generally want to feel like they have a chance at winning a case in court before bothering, it doesn't feel good to lose - even when you know in advance the case is lost.

Don't read that as lawyers never go to court unless they will win. This is obviously not true: there are many reasons to take a case to court knowing you will lose it. However if a case will be lost in court they will avoid court if possible.

The OpenWRT project is the result of a GPL enforcement action in the USA against Linksys and Software Freedom Conservancy is planning another enforcement action in the IoT space:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st... https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber...

I don't think they can do that for already-released code unless there's some clause in the licensing. For future code, they can opt to change the licensing as long as it follows the existing licensing and their possible code contribution agreements.

The GPL has a termination provision. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897105

Well, but the other party already violated the clause of the licensing.

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