GNU Chess redistribution licensing

[Alex Ignácio da Silva]

To the GNU Chess development team,

I would like to know whether it's allowed to redistribute GNU Chess
along with a third party GUI application to play chess. Since the GNU
Chess engine would be started as a separate process and communication
handled through standard input/output pipes, I believe it could be
considered a separate work independent of the GUI application, as
suggested by the FSF:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

and hence the GPL would not be applied to the GUI interface application.

Please correct me if this is not the intent of GNU Chess' development team!

Cheers,

Alex

[Simon Waters]

Alex Ignácio da Silva wrote:
> To the GNU Chess development team,
>
> I would like to know whether it's allowed to redistribute GNU Chess
> along with a third party GUI application to play chess. Since the GNU
> Chess engine would be started as a separate process and communication
> handled through standard input/output pipes, I believe it could be
> considered a separate work independent of the GUI application, as
> suggested by the FSF:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
>
> and hence the GPL would not be applied to the GUI interface application.

Your understanding appears correct to me.

GNU Chess invoked as a separate process via the Winboard interface is
mere aggregation, and doesn't affect the licensing of other code
distributed with it in this fashion.

My understanding is that such distribution, from a licensing perspective
is the same as distribution GNU Chess itself.

As you'll be distributing GNU Chess, you will incur obligations under
the GNU GPLv2, to notify them of their rights to GNU Chess, and to give
them a copy of the source code for GNU Chess (plus any modifications you
make to GNU Chess) on request. But this doesn't affect any other
applications you distribute alongside.

You are encouraged to distribute your GUI under a free software license,
but there is no obligation.

[Alex Ignácio da Silva]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for the quick response.

OK, I'll just go ahead and try to integrate my GUI application with GNU
Chess. In fact, it is open source too: it is distributed under GPLv3 but
with a FLOSS additional permission clause that allows combining it with
selected open source licenses which unfortunately aren't compatible with
the GPL:

http://www.haundrix.com/download/license.html

And by the way, I picked GNU Chess exactly because it's open source!

I'll post here in case I encounter difficulties talking to GNU Chess.

Cheers,

Alex

Simon Waters wrote:

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