Proprietary Abuses: GPL Violations, Microsoft Pluton Against Linux, Google Drive as a CMS
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Copyleft-licensed chess engine wins legal case against proprietary counterpart - FSFE
Stockfish is is a Free Software chess engine licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL-3.0). It was created in 2004 and, through its strong community support, is now the strongest chess engine available to the public. ChessBase is a German software company that develops and sells proprietary chess software.
In 2021, Stockfish filed a lawsuit against ChessBase GmbH, alleging that ChessBase had distributed to customers software products under proprietary licenses despite them being derivative works of Stockfish. The most notable derivatives were the Fat Fritz 2 and Houdini 6 software distributed by ChessBase. By doing so, Stockfish alleged that ChessBase has violated central obligations of the GPL-3.0, which ensures that users of the software are informed of their rights. Despite leading developers with Stockfish terminating their licensing of Stockfish to ChessBase, ChessBase continued to distribute a number of Stockfish derivatives.
This suit is notable as it is among the first of its type to involve a permanent termination of a Free Software license to a specific party. Additionally, Stockfish did not seek damages or other forms of financial compensation in their lawsuit, but rather pressed the court only for judicial actions that would result in the enforcement of the GPL-3.0.
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mjg59 | Quick update on Pluton and Linux
I've been ridiculously burned out for a while now but I'm taking the month off to recover and that's giving me an opportunity to catch up on a lot of stuff. This has included me actually writing some code to work with the Pluton in my Thinkpad Z13. I've learned some more stuff in the process, but based on everything I know I'd still say that in its current form Pluton isn't a threat to free software.
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One key point from this recently published Microsoft doc is that the whole "Microsoft can update Pluton firmware" thing does just seem to be the ability for the OS to push new code to the chip at runtime. That means Microsoft can't arbitrarily push new firmware to the chip - the OS needs to be involved. This is unsurprising, but it's nice to see some stronger confirmation of that.
Anyway. tl;dr - Pluton can (now) be used as a regular TPM. Pluton also exposes some additional functionality which is not yet clear, but there's no obvious mechanism for it to compromise user privacy or restrict what users can run on a Free operating system. The Pluton firmware update mechanism appears to be OS mediated, so users who control their OS can simply choose not to opt in to that.
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About the time I used Google Drive as a CMS for a web app
The idea for the CMS implementation ended up relying on Google Docs. The person writing the articles would create a new document in a specific Google Drive folder. The title of the document would be used as the title of the article, and the content would be shown as-is on the web page. To support localization, there was one subfolder for every language as well.
The backend service would periodically query the contents of the shared Google Drive folder. If new posts were found, it would export them into HTML and store them on the backend. If I recall correctly, it might have also done some sanitization or tweaks to overcome some limitations related to this setup.