No it is not. Yes it could be for your average everyday developer but if someone can run site with millions of active users alone, there is no difference in salary based on where the developer stays. Does Mistral pays $100k salary to researchers?
People working in non profits typically earn less, yes. In general, salary is not a function of how praiseworthy or important or even hard the work is. People who work for non profits have pay cut, because basically they are willing to be paid less in exchange of doing something they see as meaningful.
(Excluding purely "money washing for local mafia and politicians" non profits.)
Dude, Lichess is entirely funded by donations. There's only so much money to go around.
And Thibault iirc is the kind of person that's not terribly interested in earning lots of money. Of he wanted to, I'm sure he could make bajillions elsewhere in tech, because he's that good. But he apparently prefers to only work for a "measly" upper middle class salary and doing something he's really passionate about. And I thank him for it, because lichess is awesome.
Or full time. In some countries, those are pretty decent salaries. I earn €50k in one of the poorer European countries and that puts me in the top ~8%.
I thought so too, but another entry in their sheet is "Sysadmin (part time)" for $18k/yr. So either they forgot to put part time in parens, or they're paid full time wages. I wonder which...
Quite amazing to see that "French social security / pension contrib" are almost the same as their total server costs, and there is loads of them.
With just a few employees, it is quite interesting to compare how much do some of these contributions cost, effectively affecting only a person or two, compared to a service like Lichess which is used by 5-10 million of users each month.
Even my diamond platinum extreme chess.com subscription (or however the third-best tier of a dozen or so is called) has much less functionality than Lichess's only tier.
True
However a french chess streamer I follow had an interesting take: since Lichess is all free, all the content is computer generated, or low quality. Apparently, some content even was just stolen content from other paid platforms. His take is basically that Chess.com gives out money to many chess actors (teachers, coaches, book writers) while lichess is not helping the whole ecosystem make money. Anyways competition is good.
That’s fine by me: Not everything needs to be about money.
> Anyways competition is good.
I agree, and I have no issue with competition paid or free, but I’d have hoped that the paid one would at least also offer a better product.
I’m also to pay for chess courses! Chess.com is just not worth the price to me. I like their narrated game reviews slightly better than Lichess’s purely centipawn-driven mistake practice system, but everything else about their interface is much worse.
The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
Magnus has said multiple times in the past - through the predecessors he owned or was involved with that he is not involved in the business side much at all; he's mostly an investor and a promotional actor. Of course they didn't do this without his agreement. He's always been a fan of Lichess too and played lots of their tournaments.
All large systems are inherently weak when one individual has an outsized influence on their outcomes. The solution is not to hope Magnus is altruistic, but to not allow Magnus (or any individual) to drive meaningful outcomes directly or through their combined influence/followings.
I love Lichess more than anything, and I hope this brings a lot of donation to them that they can use independently, and that the Lichess brand does not get subsumed by Take Take Take and their corporate money.
Lichess has been absolutely fantastic platform. AS a chess enthusiast as an engineer of a chess website me and some others are building (shameless plug, https://chess67.com), they are the only platform I have worked with where so much is so easily accessible in terms of their APIs.
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
Love Lichess. These days I haven't been playing very much but always watching chess streaming commentary. So I was surprised when I saw Take Take Take had a launch party Monday but no stream on Tuesday (getting dumped by chess.com). I never play chess on a phone but I was curious to see how Take Take Take might be incorporating LLM for English language explanation. Last fall I did a sort of proof of concept of this, not nearly fleshed out like the TTT app.
So I literally dusted off an old Android tablet and played one game. Pleased to see I got logged right in to my lichess account, played a 10 + 5 unrated, did game review. I think this should be great for everybody all around, and as others have expressed I hope lichess doesn't get caught up in some business grief. The game review was not earth-shattering but decent move-by-move explanation that I think will help a lot of players, especially newer players.
I will stick to playing on lichess in browser, on a 43" tv monitor, running and reading local Stockfish eval., without the English explan.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things:
(1) Bring more people to Chess,
(2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
Love lichess - I downloaded their chess puzzle database and built a simple app for my son to learn mate-in-3 puzzles. They are amazing and deserve all the love!
The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.
For anybody who watched the new chess documentary on Netflix about the Magnus vs Hans drama, you'll remember how pissed Magnus and his dad are at chess.com, which is what makes this partnership interesting to me. (Magnus is a TTT cofounder)
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All their finances are also public: https://lichess.org/costs
I'm not sure what to think, but that's definitely interesting. I wonder what chess.com is paying their engineers.
Mistral is *for* profit.
(Excluding purely "money washing for local mafia and politicians" non profits.)
And Thibault iirc is the kind of person that's not terribly interested in earning lots of money. Of he wanted to, I'm sure he could make bajillions elsewhere in tech, because he's that good. But he apparently prefers to only work for a "measly" upper middle class salary and doing something he's really passionate about. And I thank him for it, because lichess is awesome.
With just a few employees, it is quite interesting to compare how much do some of these contributions cost, effectively affecting only a person or two, compared to a service like Lichess which is used by 5-10 million of users each month.
Even my diamond platinum extreme chess.com subscription (or however the third-best tier of a dozen or so is called) has much less functionality than Lichess's only tier.
> Anyways competition is good.
I agree, and I have no issue with competition paid or free, but I’d have hoped that the paid one would at least also offer a better product.
I’m also to pay for chess courses! Chess.com is just not worth the price to me. I like their narrated game reviews slightly better than Lichess’s purely centipawn-driven mistake practice system, but everything else about their interface is much worse.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
> I do feel a bit bad for chess.com
I'm sure they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
> I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
I also hope they manage to avoid becoming dependent on whatever this deal grants them.
The best thing they did was that they bought an amazing domain name.
> FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims
FIDE and chess.com did behave pretty shitty sometimes and I think its good Magnus is in a position to counter them a bit.
[0] https://lichess.org/@/revoof/blog/optimizing-the-tablebase-s...
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
So I literally dusted off an old Android tablet and played one game. Pleased to see I got logged right in to my lichess account, played a 10 + 5 unrated, did game review. I think this should be great for everybody all around, and as others have expressed I hope lichess doesn't get caught up in some business grief. The game review was not earth-shattering but decent move-by-move explanation that I think will help a lot of players, especially newer players.
I will stick to playing on lichess in browser, on a 43" tv monitor, running and reading local Stockfish eval., without the English explan.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things: (1) Bring more people to Chess, (2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
Keep on the amazing work,
The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.