This is not legal advice... but
It depends on what you wish to ship to the users, but if I understand
you correctly, you just wish to run GNU backgammon as a service and you
are hosting that service yourself. There is no problem with that.
The license requirements kicks in once you start shipping GNU backgammon
to the users. Say that you were to bundle your app, the server and GNU
backgammon and ship that to the users as a piece of software they could
run on their own computer. Then the license would kick in and you would
probably have to release the entire shipped code under GPL v3 and
provide the source code for download. You could still charge the users
for bundling the software if they would be willing to pay you.
Cheers, Christian.
On 07/07/2026 23.44, Peter Stephens wrote:
Hi, I am developing a commercial backgammon training app and am
considering using GNU Backgammon for move analysis in version 2.
Before proceeding Iwanted to ask the community's view on the following
architecture:,
My app would call GnuBG indirectly via bgweb-api, a third party Docker
container that wraps GnuBG as a local HTTP service. My app sends a
board position over HTTP and receives move evaluations back. No GnuBG
source code or binaries are compiled into or bundled with my app itself.,
My question is: does the community consider this out-of-process HTTP
architecture to be a GPL derivative work, or does the separation
between my app and GnuBG via a network boundary mean my app has no GPL
obligations?,
I understand this is not a substitute for formal legal advice, but any
insight from people who know the project well would be genuinely helpful.,
Thank you for your time.,
Kind regards
Peter Kotwa
