Ras wrote:Ovyron wrote:but saying "if you do it and keep it to yourself is fine".
Well, nobody cares what you do at home with open source. It is, in fact, so fine that it even conforms to the GPL.
What about edge cases? Like, cojoined twins or people with two heads, like
this one? If the Right Head makes a closed source patch for Stockfish, is it turned into a "leech" if the Left head makes use of it?
If not, is it turned into a "leech" if the cojoined twin is successfully separated and becomes a different person? So the "leech" tag isn't there the day before and automatically appears when the last cell is separate?
Can the "leech" term be applied retroactively, or retroactively removed if the twins have to merge again for some reason? For that matter, if I make a closed source patch for Stockfish and give it to a friend, and the friend dies, am I still a "leech"? What if the friend dies before opening the message, or the message is lost in a server crash and is never delivered, am I still a leech for clicking "send"?
See? "Leech" is a subjective term that doesn't appear in the licence anyway, and that you're applying in nonsensical ways. If a person's friends want some functionality in Stockfish and that person implements it at home and gives them the binary, but no source because they don't care because the friends are not programmers anyway, suddenly this person is a "leech", but not if he kept the implementation to itself?
"Leech" needs a clear definition and only be used on the cases where it applies. If someone makes a few changes to Stockfish, closes the source, changes the name, and distributes it to the world claiming to be its author, then it's clearly a leech. If I implement some new "Multi PV Depth" feature into Stockfish so that it plays different moves at low depth for variety and then give this version to my mother so she can train against the engine at low depth, and play more varied games than Multicore indeterminism allows, without giving her the source (:roll:), that shouldn't make me a "leech."
Your beliefs create your reality, so be careful what you wish for.