The German chess software company ChessBase and the team behind the open-source chess engine Stockfish have reached a settlement and ended their legal dispute over the latter's claim regarding a repeated license violation by Chessbase with their products Fat Fritz 2 and Houdini 6.
The agreement between Chessbase and Stockfish was announced on the Stockfish website on Saturday and confirmed as accurate to Chess.com by Matthias Wullenweber, owner and chief programmer of Chessbase.
The two parties involved in the litigation, which appeared before the District Court in Munich, Germany, have agreed that Chessbase, longterm, can continue distributing products as long as the company ensures compliance with the GPL-3.0 license terms and adequately informs the public about the use of the Stockfish software in its products.
The terms of the agreement include that Chessbase refrains from distributing and/or making publicly available the Stockfish software for a period of one year. After one year, Chessbase can exercise the license to the Stockfish software again, under the conditions of the GPL-3.0. In case the terms are breached, Chessbase will have to pay an appropriate amount to the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
For the purpose of informing the public, Chessbase will place a clearly visible notice on all of its websites relating to Fat Fritz 2 and/or Houdini 6, containing a text referring to the GPL-3.0 license terms and the settlement. Also, they will internally introduce...
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