My personal opinion is that it's fine:
https://github.com/facebookresearch/darkforestGo/issues/1
https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/741381620322738176
To me, this usage is very different to e.g. someone taking Pachi
as a whole and integrating it in a non-GPL product, or even taking
substantial Pachi code (board implementation, some more elaborate
tactics heuristics, ...) and *building their non-GPL engine around
that*.
No time to elaborate about the nuances (of my personal legal opinion
+ IANAL) right now, but in general licencing is not so simple that any
few lines of code will make the whole source tree GPL no questions
asked. First, it must be actually copyrightable, which is not an
automatic thing and a stretch to say about most of the bits outside
dedicated Pachi directory (which are generally just scattered pieces of
technical scaffolding). Second, it must make the rest of the source
a derivative work, which imho is clearly not the case for the simple
playout policy.
[*] If someone distributes a compiled DarkForest binary with the
"simple policy" of pachi subdirectory linked in, *that* is covered
by GPL. But it should be a trivial matter not to even link it in.
Let's not let this discussion overshadow the fact that we have the new
strongest open source bot! Congratulations and huge thanks to FAIR for
releasing it as open source. (At least if/until Pachi gets proper NN
support as well. ;-)
On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 11:02:15PM +0200, Xavier Combelle wrote:
> for me it's clearly GPL violation
>
> 2016-06-10 22:17 GMT+02:00 Darren Cook <dar...@dcook.org>:
>
> > >> At 5d KGS, is this the world's strongest MIT/BSD licensed program? ...
> > >> actually, is there any other MIT/BSD go program out there? (I thought
> > >> Pachi was, but it is GPLv2)
> > >
> > > Huh, that's interesting, because Darkforest seems to have copy-pasted
> > > the pachi playout policy:
> > >
> > >
> > https://github.com/facebookresearch/darkforestGo/blob/master/board/pattern.c#L36
> > >
> > > https://github.com/pasky/pachi/blob/master/playout/moggy.c#L101
> >
> > Uh-oh. Though it does say "inspired by" at the top, and also that it is
> > not used by the main engine:
> >
> > // This file is inspired by Pachi's engine
> > // (https://github.com/pasky/pachi).
> > // The main DarkForest engine (when specified
> > // with `--playout_policy v2`) does not depend on it.
> > // However, the simple policy opened with
> > // `--playout_policy simple` will use this library.
> >
> >
> > Darren
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Computer-go mailing list
> > Computer-go@computer-go.org
> > http://computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
> >
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--
Petr Baudis
If you have good ideas, good data and fast computers,
you can do almost anything. -- Geoffrey Hinton
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