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Why Lichess will always be free
- almavi 5y agoSo many comments failing to grasp the idea of someone wanting his job/passion to be publicly available at the cost of him not getting rich. So sad.
- 9387367 5y agoHN is most US based, that’s one of the richest countries on earth where their citizens suffering from epilepsy wear bracelets to warn others not to call an ambulance.
- yesenadam 5y agoI believe the majority on here arent from USA, if that's what you meant.
- harperlee 5y ago??? So is someone calls an ambulance and they provide you a service without you being conscious, you are liable to pay? What on Earth?
- cmeacham98 5y agoYep, welcome to the US. Bonus points for the fact ambulance rides usually cost thousands of dollars and aren't covered by most insurance plans.
- dang 5y agoTaking HN into nationalistic flamewar is exactly the wrong thing to do here and we ban accounts that do it. Please keep this sort of off-topic flamebait off this forum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html By the way, HN users were about 50% in the US, last time I checked.
- scaladev 5y agoWhat else did you expect on a ~~hacker's~~ founder's site? Make a billion and retire before hitting 20, that's the goal.
- mattplm 5y agoAlso a lot of people don't realize that he is getting rich with that salary in rural France.
- dang 5y agoThat is not even close to how this thread turned out. Would you please not post low-quality disses like this? They break the site guidelines, like this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - and they lead to extremely low-quality discussion, as seen below.
- Noos 5y agothe problem though is what happens if he gets sick or needs to move on, or the passion fades? Now you need to hire someone who may not be motivated in the same way, and if compensation is low for the duties entailed, you won't get what you need. It's not good to undervalue work because you really rely on the gift of the worker to keep the project going.
- rektide 5y agoDamn liches, we just can't stop em.
- throwanem 5y agoOut of nowhere, but I tried out k3s today and so far it's good as hell. Thanks again for the recommendation!
- sethbannon 5y agoLichess is such an inspiring demonstration of what talented enthusiasts can build, even when driven not by profit but by simple passion. You can feel the craftsmanship and the love of chess in the app and in the speed of iteration. We could use more of this in the world.
- hinkley 5y agoThere are two interpretations of “why”. What is the motivation for it being free. What is the mechanism for it being free. In one of the links, > It amounts to $170 per month. Great news: I have a job (at prismic.io) and I can completely afford that. Lichess is my hobby, and all hobbies cost a bit of money. I can tell you that the joy of building lichess is absolutely worth the price I pay for it! Maybe it’s because I spend some number of hours a week looking at trees, but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid the average technical person is around the word “forever”. If you don’t have a trust set up to pay the hosting costs in perpetuity, you’re one recession or bad illness away from it being ad-supported. Or Microsoft could make you an offer you can’t refuse like they did with Minecraft. There are plenty of legal and financial constructs meant to approximate a forever status, and I don’t see any evidence that anyone has tried to achieve any of them. When are we going to call “making promises you cannot keep” what it really is? Lying.
- rectang 5y agoPeople don't want to hear it. They want to believe in those promises. They like being told beautiful lies.
- hinkley 5y agoIt’ll be interesting watching it play out over the next five or ten years. We can’t be far from having a critical mass of people who realize all the stuff they’ve been eye-rolling at or downvoting is actually true, and then acting like they discovered something new. Half the time I’m just parroting people older than me. More field correspondent than discoverer.
- dylan604 5y agoThere's a big difference for good intentions that failed vs lying. I think you know that too. For $170 a month, it could easily switch to a patreon or other type of user contribution model. For $170 a month, it could be get a paper route to pay for it.
- rectang 5y ago
- usgroup 5y agolichess is by far the finest piece of complex online software I’ve ever used. Desktop or mobile it works perfectly. There is no Silicon Valley, Spartan hiring processes, elite University filters: just open source contribution and a great quality gate. It’s also a great example of something born of and sustained by a community: a testament to the chess demography.
- pull_my_finger 5y ago> There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. They eat up valuable screen space and bandwidth for something that nobody wants to see. They often manipulate and misinform. They have even been the source of security vulnerabilities many times in the past. While I share the loathing of modern Ads as a service or whatever the technical name for giving Google/Ad Choices a blank check to serve whatever they want on a piece of your web real estate, I think you can certainly put up a banner or something responsibly. If I run a web dev blog and I put a banner for my VPS that has a my referral code, or I come to an agreement with said VPS to show an ad for guaranteed credit or I just sell the space directly to XYZ company that is relevant to my users I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users. If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations, I would be OK with that as long as it's done tastefully and responsibly.
- surfsvammel 5y agoI believe what they are saying is that money is not the goal, the goal is the spread chess, and having ads does not contribute to that goal. That’s it. I find it quiet strange, that we are living in a world where ads are so ubiquitous that a site is explaining why they don’t have ads, rather than webpages that use ads explain why they do.
- DorianSinDeep 5y agoWhile its good that you're willing to compromise in a reasonable manner, I don't think it has particular relevance to the point that advertisements in any form are most likely to be about something you won't go looking for yourself. There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves.
- aaronbrethorst 5y agoThis is a nice, albeit reductive hypothesis. Literally the last thing I did before posting this comment was email a link to a Facebook in-app ad’s advertised product to myself because I wanted to look at it in more detail tomorrow. I wasn’t looking for the product it was advertising, but I see how it could be extremely useful for me if it works.
- laydn 5y agoCost breakdown here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSkHLJKJkb0ZuI4/preview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk... I hope OVH would donate some compute/machines to lichess. It would help lichess a lot financially. It would be good publicity for OVH and I think it would be a drop in the ocean on their balance sheet.
- nly 5y agoHoly hell that's an expensive project. Do donations cover all this, or are the operators independently wealthy and generous?
- YetAnotherNick 5y agoThat's a cheap project. I have seen a single developer's salary to be more than that. Considering that around a billion games were played last year in lichess.
- ishiz 5y agoWhat I find interesting is the part at the bottom that shows how much a donation helps: a $5 donation is enough to cover the company's budget for 6 minutes. This sounds really good for a few reasons: 1) since I play Lichess for several hours a month, I feel that I'm really getting my money's worth; 2) Lichess only needs a few thousand people to contribute $5/mo to stay net positive and I feel like it's easier to convince a few thousand people in a supportive community to part ways with $5 than it is for other companies to get a million people to donate $1; 3) I remember Reddit used to show on your profile how many server minutes your Gold purchase was worth and it would display something like 200 minutes for every $5 purchase, but this is only a single server out of hundreds and doesn't account for any other expenses, so Lichess is unsurprisingly very cheap to operate in comparison.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoUh, $55k a year is not cheap! What world... Ok, it's late, I'll hold back the rest of my words. :) I think you were saying it's cheap relative to the impact it has. I agree. But "holy hell that's expensive" is an entirely accurate reaction for someone who wants to fund it out of pocket. (Gwern covers our TPU/ML infrastructure costs for around $350/mo, and I wince that I wasn't able to optimize it cheaper.)
- haskal 5y agoPuzzle Streak/Storm/Racer are the only equivalents that Lichess lacked from Chess.com, but so happy to see them added (like 1-2 months ago?) Lichess is responsible for most of my chess progress through matches, puzzles, analysis board. Excellent piece of software.
- PradeetPatel 5y agoExcellent article. Serious kudos to the Lichess team on building and operating such a complex piece of software purely on donations. I think the most valuable lesson here for me is the understanding between the contributors and their key stakeholders. Because monetary gains and growth are not their KPI, they were able to maintain their software at their own pace. Thought exercise: Do you foresee this model staying if Lichess were to be acquired by another company?
- cassepipe 5y ago"Lichess is a non-profit association in France"
- beforeolives 5y agoI know you framed it as a thought exercise but it's unlikely they'll be acquired - https://lichess.org/contact#help-buy https://lichess.org/contact#help-buy
- philliphaydon 5y agoWow I've never seen or heard of this site, but it's so fast! Navigating anywhere is basically instant for me. Really nice.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Hammershaft 5y agoI just wish Lichess had more accurate ratings
- matsemann 5y agoWhat do you mean by "accurate"? Compared to chess.com? FIDE? USCF? It really makes no sense comparing ratings between different pools. None of them are more accurate, they are just different.
- rgoulter 5y agohttps://lichess.org/page/rating-systems https://lichess.org/page/rating-systems Yes, ratings can't be compared between different pools. Different rating systems can perform with different accuracy, though: Which rating system is best? The purpose of rating systems is to predict the outcome of games. Therefore, they can be objectively better or worse, according to their ability to make such predictions. Glicko 1 makes better predictions than Elo, and Glicko 2 makes better predictions than Glicko 1
- Hammershaft 5y ago'accurate' is definitely the wrong term. I just meant I wished Lichess ratings translated more accurately to FIDE ratings.
- V-2 5y agoIt's not really feasible though: * Online chess typically uses Glicko ratings (this applies to Lichess and chess.com alike), FIDE ratings are based on Elo * Online ratings are typically blitz ratings - people tend to play fast games online. Obviously FIDE has blitz ratings too, but over the board chess is mostly standard time control, and that's what's typically referred to as a FIDE rating. A lot of people with standard FIDE rating don't even have a blitz one, because OTB blitz tournaments are arguably rare.
- kissgyorgy 5y agoSure this is a very nice cause, but if you don't have proper revenue, you can't pay UX designers to make something more people could use. Explains why Lichess is straight up ugly and the interface is just messy.
- neatze 5y agoYou making interesting point, with for profit model you can provide better service then with non-profit model to some degree, but it is not always true. There many reasons for such cases, but I think it all comes down to leadership and values of the company, over time leadership and consequently values will change, undoubtedly. Such changes result in higher or lower preference of service to end users versus profits (or innovation, control priorities), I think this is irrespective of for/non-profit organizations.
- user48a 5y agoI don't think it is fair to claim that "Lichess is straight up ugly and the interface is just messy" in such absolute terms. While this might be your opinion, I for one like their design a lot and think it's very clean!! (and prefer it to alternative chess websites)...
- eeegnu 5y agoThere are also open source browser extensions for restyling lichess: https://prettierlichess.github.io/ https://prettierlichess.github.io/
- sellyme 5y agoLichess makes fantastic use of the screen space available, works excellently on all manners of devices, has a native darkmode, and puts the most relevant content front-and-center instead of designing around revenue generation first and functionality second. Just because damn-near every other website on the internet is comprised entirely of gradients and parallax scrolling doesn't mean any that doesn't is "ugly".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
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- krisgenre 5y agoI love lichess but before that (in mid 2000's) used to spend a lot of time on freechess.org. Not sure how popular it is now.
- yesenadam 5y agoI think you mean FICS (Free Internet Chess Server)! It started in 1995 I think. I started there too about 2007. It's still going, I visited a few months ago. A bit sleepier than it was. That was the place to follow the moves of live tournaments and discuss the games, before the age of live video broadcasts of tournaments. I loved it so much. Channel 23 was for quacking only etc hehe. Also I mainly played slower games (10 10 or 5 14) and chatted with a lot of the people I played, must have met people from almost every country in the world. I haven't found other sites nearly so friendly.
- krisgenre 5y agoYes. I mostly played 2 12. The place felt like IRC for chess, you had to type commands like 'seek 2 12' for a new game and you needed some desktop client like winboard/xboard to play. Edit: Just played a game, my ID was still active and my last game was in 2012!
- yesenadam 5y agohehe nice. Yes, FICS is for life. Oh, you didn't use a client?! Mainly I used BabasChess (Windows), which was awesome, I've still never had such a good chess game seeking and playing experience on any site.
- facesonflags 5y agopychess has done pretty well for me, recently updated
- nindalf 5y agoI might have played 2000 games on lichess at this point. Everything from the ease of finding a game, to the smoothness of web and mobile clients, to features centred around analysing and improving your game are nearly flawless. Seeing this post about their commitment to keeping it that way thrills me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ridiculous_fish 5y agoThere is Wikipedia, then lichess. Thank you.
- xorfish 5y agoI would add https://ourworldindata.org https://ourworldindata.org to that list
- dagurp 5y agoThe first thing I notice on this site is a banner telling me that I will be tracked unless I opt out. This isn't even GDPR compliant.
- sampo 5y ago> This isn't even GDPR compliant. Our World in Data in run by Oxford University, so outside of EU. The applicability of EU GDPR laws outside EU is a complicated topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation#Applicability_outside_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
- kjakm 5y agoAlthough the GDPR is an EU Regulation it is incorporated into UK law and that hasn't changed since Brexit. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/dp-at-the-end-of-the-transition-period/data-protection-now-the-transition-period-has-ended/the-gdpr/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/dp-at-the-end-of-the-tr...
- hellow0rldz 5y agoIt's not that complicated but if you are too small you don't worry about it. If you are big (like this site here) you have lawyers so you also don't worry about it.
- n_f 5y agolichess > chess.com
- DoryMinh 5y agoWhy do you prefer lichess to chess.com?
- wright08 5y agoChess.com is super bloated, slow to load, and hard to navigate. There's so much noise on the screen compared to playing on lichess. Features are paywalled. For example if I want to know how the top players are responding to a certain sequence of moves, I can just see that on lichess. Also weird stuff is locked like using your own computer to analyze games. Also if you haven't been to the site for awhile you get a lovely modal again asking you for money. It's not that getting paid for services is bad, it's just awful when there's a better quality free service.
- V-2 5y agoYes - not only features are limited and paywalled (fine, you need to keep the lights on), but they're nagging you about buying a subscription at every turn (now this feels intrusive to me). Their UI also feels clunky and dated: kind of like a 90s, or early 2000s desktop app. They do offer much more features, but most of them aren't even remotely essential to me: like a bazillion of bizarre chess variants (lichess has a few simple alternatives, but no stuff like 4-player chess etc.), or "personalized" bots to play against ("play against Beth Harmon"; it feels very Disneylandish to me), and so on. This being said, I don't mean to bash chess.com, it has certain advantages, and I do play on both websites. Still, lichess is my go-to, no-nonsense, default option.
- Petrova 5y agochess.com consistently lags for me why Lichess does not. I often lose completely winning positions because of the lag.
- greyman 5y ago
- peter_retief 5y agoI just had a quick game, thanks for keeping this going, I can donate a very small amount monthly, how do I do that?
- peter_retief 5y agoFound the link its done.
- CynicusRex 5y agohttps://lichess.org/patron https://lichess.org/patron
- dna_polymerase 5y agoCase in point, Slate Star Codex advertising used to be quite good. I remember it had these riddles from Jane Street, who where looking for people to hire this way. Also, because the ads were somewhat long running they weren't as intrusive and attention seeking like ever changing ad spots by Google or something. Saw them once, didn't bother me ever again.
- mproud 5y agoAlways good to see. (I’m tired of seeing ads everywhere too!) Bravo. Though, I disagree on the restaurant analogy. Not being open-source isn’t the lack of willingness to share the ingredients. It’s choosing not to share the recipe, which is almost every restaurant.
- inferense 5y agoThis is a bummer. As much as I love lichess, I think there's a beautiful array of opportunities of monetisation which I believe would be nothing short of wrong incentives. Value-based monetisation (instead of restriction / ad based monetisation) might as well motivate the team to maximise that value for the user. Just a couple of examples (for which I'd be actually willing to pay for) 1. Stockfish, server-side game analysis, learning from mistakes 2. Deep individual analysis based on XY games, practicing on weak spots, openings etc. with stockfish 3. Their practice library Again, all of these are super valuable to those who want to take their game to the next level, don't see why anyone in that segment wouldn't pay for this. The "entertainment" feature of lichess which is the chess itself should be free indeed.
- thomasahle 5y ago> 1. Stockfish, server-side game analysis, learning from mistakes I'm not sure what you mean by 2 and 3, but lichess already has server side analysis. If it's just that you'd like to pay for it, you can set up donations. You can also contribute your own server to the analysis cluster. Lichess is a really inspiring project on how a free/open source software community can provide the same value based features that we normally assume can only be done by monetization.
- yesenadam 5y ago> beautiful array of opportunities of monetisation I think that's the first time I've seen "beautiful" and "monetisation" in the same phrase.
- sireat 5y agoI love Lichess (13k+ games and counting). It is a worthy alternative to chess.com model . There should be room for both.(chessbase.com, ICC, FICS are lesser alternatives now) That said this low pressure model only works when you are a lean shop(single developer proficient in Scala) AND have millions of users. Running a lean shop might be an admirable goal but millions of users is not for every project. There are thousands of worthy open source projects which struggle to give their creator sustenance through donations. The exceptions are few(Vue comes to mind).
- V-2 5y ago"(chessbase.com, ICC, FICS are lesser alternatives now)" I'd say that the main competitor of the two is now Chess24. It follows the subscription/premium model, taking it even further than Chess.com. Eg. the latter doesn't require you to be a paid user just to export a pgn of your own game - but Chess24 does.
- V-2 5y agoI meant the *former. Chess.com gives you access to the game record at least (even if its analysis functions are limited for free users). Chess24 doesn't
- yesenadam 5y agoChess24 also has I think by far the best output of free chess videos on youtube.[0] My two favourite chess channels are chess24 and chess24 en español. e.g. I'm about to watch the Candidates tournament right now on there, with Judit Polgar commentating and live video. The first few days had Magnus Carlsen (!) commentating. chess24 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTCNuQ2mGfW6-SpHpaze_g/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTCNuQ2mGfW6-SpHpaze_g/vid... en español https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTzRQxC3i7GOT4jtiTq4e0w/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTzRQxC3i7GOT4jtiTq4e0w/vid... (Divis, el Fo, Niño Anton etc) For years I played online a lot, but I gave up playing (it's too easy to play all night!) and just watch tournaments. Also banter blitz, on the chess24 channels, with e.g. Dubov, Grischuk, So, Radjabov, Karjakin, Nepo etc etc, not to mention Magnus, is amazing—hearing first-hand how the strongest players think. It's not always fun playing chess, but it's always a lot of fun watching! Every second. [0] St Louis youtube channel, except for major tournaments, which they do very well, is super-lame compared to years ago when Yasser, Ben Finegold etc were regularly doing video lectures.
- ComodoHacker 5y agoI can praise their stance, but one critical point left unaddressed is sustainability.
- paduc 5y agoIf donations are enough to pay for all costs (including a salary for the developer), I can't see how you could say it is not sustainable.
- ComodoHacker 5y agoYes, after rereading the article I've found this info. At first reading I was expecting a separate section and missed it.
- 9387367 5y agoWould be interesting to see how much money the people here saying Lichess shouldn’t be free or should serve ads, have actually donated to Lichess if they use the site and are so concerned with their sustainability. Lichess has been live for over a decade, they are a proven success.
- greyman 5y agoI like lichess, it is my first go to website to play chess, but for-profit models also have their advantages. For example in chess.com, they pay grandmasters to be there, and one can learn a lot from grandmasters. They earn money, and invest them back so the site can be even better. So I think neither model is wrong, or inherently better than the other.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- almavi 5y agoYou almost sound like the world champion don't usually play on Lichess.
- casion 5y agoHe plays there sometimes, but not usually.
- gokhan 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ6prlKz3aQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ6prlKz3aQ Carlsen, on Lichess, against other GMs and FMs.
- aloisdg 5y agoWhen you have to pay someone to play on your platform because they prefer to play on another one.
- philshem 5y agoThe world needs Libackgammon!
- patrickdavey 5y agoFibs.com ?
- S4M 5y agoYou can make it! There is already lishogi.org for shogi (Japanese chess) and lidraughts.org for draughts. They took the code for lichess and tweaked it for their respective games.
- philshem 5y agoI probably can’t, but I could put up some seed money and set up a non-profit.
- cableshaft 5y agoThank you for pointing out this out and making it click in my head that what they're doing could be done for other games. I've got one or two game designs of my own that I could probably make something like this with, but it didn't really click I could use this code as a reference until then.
- S4M 5y agoWell, good luck for your endeavors and please let me know (email in my profile) if you need a beta tester or early user.
- cableshaft 5y agoWill probably be a while before that happens, if it happens, but I'll put down your email just in case. I do have other game designs I'm working on and a different version of the game I'm thinking of that is aimed at a bit more of a casual audience (even putting Twitch streamer friendly things in there), but I do hope to get to a point where there can be some real data on how to play well in the game, and it is basically a board game anyway (I have a physical prototype for the board game version made, but it's never been published).
- kthejoker2 5y agoIn a simple 2x2x2 matrix of * product aimed at specific audience / general audience * product is "one big idea" / a lot of little ideas * product requires long term engagement / short term engagement Only "specific audience" / "one big idea" / "long term engagement" can expect to - indeed, must - thrive on patronage. The 7 other boxes are beholden to their users' fickleness.
- brainwad 5y agoWikipedia would seem to be general audience / big idea / short-term but survives on patronage.
- ece 5y agoAnd it's not immune to editor and user fickleness.
- kthejoker2 5y agoTrue! :) I guess if your idea is "big" enough to attract an audience approaching the entire human civilization, you can survive short-term engagement :)-
- sssilver 5y agoHow much of Wikipedia’s annual budget is actually paid for by companies like Google?
- vixen99 5y agoThis was not the best of examples - 'Imagine if scientists kept the result of every scientific study to themselves.'. Given that most science is funded ultimately by taxpayers either directly or via money borrowed on their behalf by governments, this would be an indefensible position aside from demonstrating an ignorance of how science progresses.
- joelthelion 5y agoBeing funded by tax payers doesn't prevent most research from being published behind a steep paywal at no benefit for the researchers...
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoThe more full quote: > Imagine if scientists kept the result of every scientific study to themselves. The same work would have to be done over and over again as everyone was forced to reinvent the wheel countless times to do anything at all. Computer scientists do exactly this, as it's possible to publish while withholding your source-code. This is harmful not only in that effort is wasted reimplementing published algorithms, but also in that the reader is deprived of the ability to check the source-code for bugs that might impact the published results. This topic has cropped up before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706
- lavp 5y agoLichess is truly on a class of its own. It delivers a better service than any of it’s alternatives (in my opinion), and it’s actually 100% free with no BS. Funny enough, I’ve donated around $30 in total which is $30 more than I would’ve ever thought of spending on a chess site. Hats off to thibault and the open source community for creating such a wonderful gem.
- dav43 5y agoLikewise, I found myself donating because - for me - it’s generated great value.
- heinrichhartman 5y agoJust donated $30 myself. I use this site every week. It's such a great product! Here is the direct link: https://lichess.org/patron https://lichess.org/patron PS: I also donated a few month of CPU time to fuel their Game Analytics a while ago: https://lichess.org/help/contribute https://lichess.org/help/contribute
- ycombinete 5y agoI donate a tiny $5 a month. Not bad for a service I use everyday. Another way to help is to host an analysis server[0]. I give them one core of my old i3-5100. It’s easy to setup, and I like knowing that it’s chugging away 24/7. [0] https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet
- chengiz 5y agoIn case you're using paypal, it seems paypal takes 9% of that $5, see their costs spreadsheet posted elsewhere here. If you can, try donating bigger amounts less frequently. The fee goes down to 3% at ~$60.
- alisonkisk 5y agoDonate annually or one lifetime gift do the money goes to the recipient instead of the finance industry.
- 5y ago
- kohlerm 5y agoGreat post, especially being open about the costs is great information. Lichess is amazing!
- jek0 5y ago> So why are there ads on websites? There is only one purpose they serve: to make money. If there are things that could make Lichess way better but require resource they don't have, they should weight the pros and cons. The cost is a worst user experience. The benefit is money. For a non-profit, money is a mean and not an end. Resource will be used to achieve a purpose. Maybe in some cases the benefit can outweigth the cost.
- tangjurine 5y agoThere's a cost breakdown, but no information I found on how much income the site brings in... Curious.
- tangjurine 5y agoActually, on the lichess forum two years ago one of the volunteers stated that costs ~= revenue. So I'm guessing that the main developer salary is mostly the "excess".
- oytis 5y agoWould be great to have a search engine or a registry board for non-monetized subset of web.
- sammy2244 5y agoThey are paying way too much for their infrastructure
- Zebfross 5y agoIt is noble, but I disagree about ads. Maybe there are products that chess players would be genuinely interested in that a company would be willing to pay to have advertised. It can be completely customized to be tasteful and unobtrusive, and users may even be thankful for it. On Wikipedia I’d way rather have tasteful ads than the half screen request for donations.
- neop1x 5y agoI agree with OP and disagree with you. People are different. I hate ads and I rarely buy products via ads. More often I use friend recommendation or product reviews/comparisons. I don't want to see ads when I am not planning to buy something.
- thelean12 5y ago> users may even be thankful for it That's really just something we tell ourselves to feel better about serving ads. It doesn't actually match reality.
- luke2m 5y agoLichess is one of those examples where the open source alternative is actually the best and most well known.
- V-2 5y agoI do prefer lichess, but is it "most well known"? If we measure it by the number of users (what else), chess.com dwarfs it really.
- eloisant 5y agoThibault Duplessis is actually an ex co-worker of mine, and this guy is truly impressive. Not only he is a very talented developer, he really sticks to his beliefs and made what Lichess is today. He used to take up a job for a year or so, save money, and travel the world for a year or so until money runs out. Then he would come back to France and take up a new job. All working on Lichess during his free time. For a few years now he has enough donation to pay himself enough money for his expenses, while he could have been a startup millionaire if he had decided to take a different path. But he proved that you can have a successful non-profit, free of charge, free from ads service. Not just source code, but an actual service hosted with millions of users. We need more people like Thibault.
- kome 5y agoI love absolutely everything about this. Thank you for sharing his story. Free/Libre software has been built thanks to principled people like him. It's truly a collective effort. And corporations started to slowly eroding it from within.
- phoinix 5y agoHe may as well be a millionaire in the future. By having a platform that people use you do get a minimal amount of bug fixing and stability of the platform. Lichess is a platform for companies to use it for their purposes with some tweaks here and there it can be an education platform, a platform for engineers to practice the internals of machines and many more possibilities. Joomla is open source and their devs make so much money selling plugins and widgets. Who is the best man for the job to tweak the platform than the developers who made the open source core of it? I use lichess everyday for years, the stability of the platform is absolutely top notch. An absolute minimal amount of bugs, no glitches in the website, every page i click on, loads instantaneously. The commercial website Chess24 and closed source, doesn't have "ultrabullet' games, very quick games of 15 seconds, because their platform cannot support it. lol
- aaronax 5y agoI think the "plugins and widgets" path to making money easily ends up being detrimental to the original free thing. Instead of spending time just improving the thing, one ends up carefully planning out what can acceptably be broken out separately, how to make the thing extensible, billing, advertising, funneling...just all kinds of garbage. Eventually you end up with a load of staff who are dependent on the thing for their livelihoods, and that influences decision-making. Next up is selling to a company with big resources "to empower us to complete the original vision" and soon after a new scrappy upstart releases their free alternative, to start the cycle again.
- torgian 5y agoI used to have a coworker named Thibault, I wonder if this is the same guy.
- everyone 5y agoRead that as "Why Liches will always be free" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lich_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lich_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)
- teachingassist 5y agoIf Lichess is a French Charitable Association, why do its (very clear) terms say that we agree to follow the laws of England and Wales? https://lichess.org/terms-of-service https://lichess.org/terms-of-service This seems rather an odd arrangement. Does anyone have any insight here?
- almavi 5y agoGood question!
- brainwad 5y agoBecause English contract law has a reputation for reliability, thanks to the common law doctrine of stare decisis, which binds courts to decide the same way as previous cases with the same facts were decided (modulo appeals courts). French law, by contrast, gives much more freedom to judges to decide each case individually, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice just creates legal uncertainty for everyone involved. As to why English law, and not, say, New York or New South Wales law, well: England is only 21 miles from France.
- codethief 5y ago> but in practice just creates legal uncertainty for everyone involved. Citation needed. Both civil law and common law seem to have their respective pros and cons. At least my understanding of common law is that in common law you need to be familiar with all past related cases dating back to who knows when, which doesn't exactly make interpreting and understanding the terms of a contract any easier.
- sixstringtheory 5y agoIt seems common sense enough that no citation is required. Get a judge having a bad day in France and your case could go belly up regardless of merits, customs or precedent. “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” So why retread the same legal wheel over and over? Why not study prior similar cases to at least see if they thought of something you didn’t?
- phoinix 5y agoDonating CPU time, is one thing unique on lichess compared to other websites. When there is a commercial website, why should i donate CPU for their CEO to put another digit on his payroll? Considering that ML and chess engines are now only starting, how about making a hybrid model of bitcoin mining and the cpu/gpu cost of analyzing chess games? That way one percentage of the energy consumed of the mining, on bitcoin or whatever, isn't immediately thrown out of the window. Or maybe making a hybrid model of analyzing the DNA of embryos to find defects, and bitcoin mining for the same reason. One fact not many people know is that economy in ancient Greece, was something women were doing. Men when there was something we wanted, we made wars. I foresee that there will be a digital coin like bitcoin that people will use, and that is gonna start from the women only. We, men, are not cut out like this, exchanging of goods in a peaceful manner.
- foobarbecue 5y agoWhat you're describing is a "proof of work" system, such as gridcoin. Men and women are not intrinsically different in the way you imply they are. That is culturally constructed.
- phoinix 5y agoI didn't know about gridcoin. Thanks for that. However when i play chess the moment i smell that my opponent is female i immediately start playing more aggressively, and my opponent starts backs down. The statistics of the top chess players do prove me right. I have tried it myself many times. Against female players i don't try to play the objectively best move like usual, i consciously try to make the female player be afraid of their position and they lose by themselves.
- andrewzah 5y agoThat sounds like a personal problem, and not really gender related. You should ask yourself why you're having difficulties treating people the same especially in a game.
- eplanit 5y ago"Would you buy a meal if the restaurant refused to tell you the ingredients? Would you buy a car if you weren’t allowed to look under the hood?" Ok, but I'm not buying the website, just using it.
- xipho 5y agoThis is glorious: https://lichess.org/features https://lichess.org/features. Love the side by side comparison :).
- crazypython 5y agoPeople often forget the freedom to modify or hire someone to modify for you is an important part of open source.
- cdelsolar 5y agoI made a site heavily inspired by lichess (specifically AGPL, no ads ever, free forever), but for crossword board games (think Scrabble, Words with Friends, etc). You can see it here at https://woogles.io https://woogles.io It has been growing steadily and we're about to hit 400K games played; it's the site of choice for the streaming community and we just finished hosting the World Blitz Championship this past week :) Thibault is sort of my hero. We've talked about doing some sort of cross-promotion but I'd like to polish our app a bit more before I follow up again.
- earthscienceman 5y agoI wish you the absolute best of luck. If this notion/method of operating community platforms takes off, the world will be far better for it. Imagine if the average human's interaction with the internet were open free (both as in beer and as in idealistically) platforms that encouraged social collaboration, personal interaction, and community formation. Wikipedia, Lichess... maybe woogles. It could easily be an impetus for social change in the meat-flesh world. Even more powerful if it seeps into "real" social media platforms. It sounds like a revival and reformation of the diverse community diasporas around during web 1.0. ... so much better than the vision for the future coming from the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the primary users of HackerNews. The future is for the people.
- dang 5y ago> the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the primary users of HackerNews. That's a serious misperception. Only about 10% of HN users were anywhere near SV, last I checked, and the vast majority of those aren't "powerful technocrats". I frequently see comments like this setting up (or expressing) barriers between the commenter and the rest of the community, when the truth is that the community is mostly just like themselves. I think it's important to realize this. How can we function as a community if people are suspecting and/or putting down everybody else who's here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- 5y ago
- blastro 5y agocan't say enough good things about lichess. we almost don't deserve it!
- neweraccount 5y agoSorry if this question is off topic. What is the seemingly random characters in blog url "../YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/..". Does it have any significance in article or blog management? For all blog articles from lichess I see this.
- Eduard 5y agoIs this a chess website? Nothing in the news nor the interface mentioned chess.
- cushychicken 5y agoLove that his posted description of lichess.org is "a hippie communist chess server for drug fueled atheists" lol
- ece 5y agoLichess is great and they mention FICS in one of their blog posts as a great way to play too: https://lichess.org/blog/WrbfjyYAAMOualZ5/our-favourite-open-source-chess-websites https://lichess.org/blog/WrbfjyYAAMOualZ5/our-favourite-open... They also mention kfchess, which I didn't know about, and other open source educational, puzzle, variant chess sites and the lc0 engine based on AlphaZero.
- Ecco 5y agoI read that as "Why Lichees will always be free". That would have been fun :-)
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoWhy we can't make this unfree, or why it would never be in our interest to make this unfree, are a lot more convincing than why we promise this will always be free.
- roofwellhams 5y agoI didn't know what is lichess but looks amazing!
- boatsie 5y agoI love the sentiment but you often see these promises broken, so I won’t hold my breath. Imagine someone offers him a billion dollars for the site. Do you really believe he would refuse and hold to these promises? Would you?
- sealeck 5y ago(a) capitalism means that people are unlikely to offer him $1 billion for the product (b) doesn't this assumes that having $1 billion is much more valuable than being an instrumental part of an online community which brings so much happiness to so many people (c) wealth has diminishing returns (in terms of material circumstances) and the person who runs this doesn't seem to be after power
- 29athrowaway 5y agoThere are forks of lichess for other games. - lidraughts.org - lishogi.org
- a_lieb 5y agoHere's a business model for successful open-source projects—one that's already in use, but I think is rarely seen as a business model per se. I'd be interested to see if there's a blog post or the like about this already. If you're the head of a successful OSS project and you believe it's helping your career in the way of industry notoriety, good demo work to show potential employers, etc.—then give a cut to cover the project's expenses, or even hire folks for freelance work. There might be stretches when you're not going to make any extra money from the project; say you've reached the point where the project isn't a top line-item in your resume and is probably not responsible for your next salary bump. You can still honor what you've gotten from the project by voluntarily investing back a portion of the money. It has a "benefit corporation" flavor. If this sounds like too much generosity to expect of people, consider people like Thibault. He's very, very deep into the "generous" side, in that pretty clearly he could work on the project _far_ less and still get a dream job. What I'm describing is a way to make an overall profit and still feel like you're giving back to the world by nurturing the project you've built. Obviously, this is an overwhelmingly common thing in practice already, whether it's someone who made an OSS project to get a good job and then continued to work in their spare time to maintain it, or language BDFLs who maintain the project on a volunteer basis, but as a result of founding the language they have amazing and well-paying day jobs. But so far I've never seen it described as an actual business model, where you can feel great about helping to keep up your project, but still come out ahead overall.
- cableclasper 5y agoBrilliant and powerful statement. Kudos to Lichess. But this part: > Imagine if scientists kept the result of every scientific study to themselves. The same work would have to be done over and over again as everyone was forced to reinvent the wheel countless times to do anything at all. Instead, scientists share their work and collaborate which benefits all of us. raised my eyebrows. If only it were true. Aside from paywalled journals, we don't have a centralized repositories of data in most fields, probably because a lot of it is proprietary (or intends to be) in the first place.
- skoocda 5y agoThibaud's comment almost seems sarcastic- given the extent of the replication crisis [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- ineedasername 5y agoThey'll never get to unicorn status with that attitude. Heck, they have no moat! Anyone can just walk in, use their source code, and set up their own free chess site! I'm sure this is all great for chess lovers and the game of chess as a whole, but what about all of the investors who will never have the thrill of a 10% IPO pop? It just seems kind of selfish to make such an amazing site and then not try to cash in on all that value.
- thisiswater 5y agoPsychopathic not to extract value for shareholders indeed.
- fredros 5y agoThey should switch license to sspl or bsl!
- musicale 5y ago> There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. They eat up valuable screen space and bandwidth for something that nobody wants to see. They often manipulate and misinform. They have even been the source of security vulnerabilities many times in the past. It's weird that web advertising is utterly terrible and toxic but I am actually nostalgic for print ads from Fry's Electronics (rip). They were one of my favorite parts of print newspapers. Old computer magazines also had great advertisements.
- leowoo91 5y agohttps://database.lichess.org https://database.lichess.org is where all game data is stored and indexed fyi
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- encryptluks2 5y agoWhen something requires you to sign up it is no longer free. This is free as in Facebook.
- sabujp 5y agoYou could literally donate $5 to lichess and that would provide enough funding for more games than most people would ever play in a lifetime ($0.00021 per game, thats 23809 games at $5) : https://lichess.org/costs https://lichess.org/costs
- craggy 5y agoSince Lichess is open-source, I'd love to see an Arimaa app built from it. That would be awesome, since arimaa.com is really geared towards desktop use.
- SagelyGuru 5y agoLichess is so good that I spent more time there than I probably should have.
- xony 5y agoi dont know what they make , but I like their Ideology