Thibault 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.
A way to have more people like Thibault is to make it so the cost of living is extremely cheap, if not totally guaranteed. A society creates its people.
If you develop for a niche you care about, even not for profit, it shouldn't be hard to cover the bill (along with other day job). I'm doing so but in small scale so far.
I do agree, but most people want a lot of money. They might say they just want some protein in their noodles, but deep down they are a Zuck.
It seems like every financially successful developer out there came from a middle/upper class enviornment.
Once they smell money, it's always more, more, and more. If the get big enough they blame it on their shareholders?
Guys like Thibault are a different breed. They are rare. I have a feeling his payoff will be huge in the future, and it will be a combination of respect, and a fulfilled guilt free life.
I don't feel like arguing. Their must be few Horatio Algers out there banging away, and just want a comfortable life. It just seems like most people that's never ever enough once they get the whiff of financial opportunity. I truly believe Zuckerburg could have had a legitimate shot at running for president if it wasn't for greed. (He pondered running a few years ago with calculated photo op trips to the midwest.)
What we need is a system that incenctivises people like Thibault, rather than incentivise people to develop nastier ways to make people click on ads :)
Enable, not incentivise. Incentives are there, curiosity, community, gratification, etc. What people lack is the financial security to do nice things untainted with commercial interest, even in modern countries with proper welfare.
I 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.
What an inspiration! I’m doing more or less the same with c0d3.com
Been working on the learning community for about 5 years now.
I’ve saved up enough for a year, will be quitting In 2 weeks to go back to teaching and improving the experience and teach more students about good engineering practices.
He 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
I 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.
I 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
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.
I 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.
> 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?
My sister plays a lot of scrabble so I am happy to be able to share your site with her.
If I can be so bold as to offer one criticism of your site though, it was a bit confusing when I first clicked to look at it. The first page is a barrage of information none of which seemed relevant for my first visit. I clicked the links at the top of the page and ended up on completely different web sites with equally confusing first pages.
Eventually I did click and watch a scrabble game being played, which looked great!
This is brilliant, just being able to spectate high ELO scrabble games is unreasonably entertaining. The kind of words these people come up with is crazy.
I know lichess invests a lot of energy into catching cheaters, is that something you've had to look into? I imagine it's much harder to catch cheaters than in chess.
Yes, we actually have come up with some algorithms for flagging cheaters, and then a small team of experts reviews the games in question. The algorithms are the only part of the site that is closed source at the moment; if we move over to machine learning we may open them (I think of something like Irwin).
The algorithms have been successful at catching a nontrivial number of cheaters already, most of whom have admitted it and gotten their account back after a suspension.
It is a super cool problem - I think we can catch more with machine learning (the funny thing is, my day job is in fraud detection using machine learning, so there is some overlap :)
Yes!!! Finally --- it is about time that someone made a modern alternative to isc.ro which is full of security problems (e.g. passwords stored in plaintext; your rack is randomly generated on the clientside) and looks ugly.
Any plans to allow the use of your site without a login? I'd like to play with my family but getting them all to create an account would be too difficult.
We have heard this a few times, and the backend supports it, but we need to make a few changes in the front end to make it happen. I think we'd like to do this in the future.
Presumably the owners of the trade marks you just referred to (Scrabble, etc.) are onboard [no pun intended!] with you? Otherwise I see tortuous infringement court cases in your future!?
I thought Mattel only allowed their own online games to be called "Scrabble" RTM.
Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way to my employment.
We play a crossword board game named OMGWords - I only mentioned Scrabble, etc. to explain what I meant by a "crossword board game". The _rules_ of this game are compatible with those of the Scrabble(R) Brand Crossword Game.
Lichess 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.
I 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.
In 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.
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.
It's interesting that he spends so little on servers.
1 billion chess games per year, often with >20k concurrent users and and some very heavy-duty engine analysis occurring for some proportion of these games and they only spends $56k.
I have seen startups with only hundreds of customers spend 10x this on AWS by copying the fancy tools used by tech giants.
It is also interesting how little the creator pays himself ($56k) and how much he spends on data protection ($40k), taxes ($52k) and various administration tasks. I wonder if his time is as heavily skewed towards administration as his expenditure.
I would also like to meet this guy, buy him a beer/coffee and thank him for the value he has created:).
Computers have been so fast for a good + 15yrs. If you don't use bloatware and pile on layers and layers of crap and with good system engineering it's amazing the amount of work you can compute for so little cost.
I feel like the developer/founder should have a higher salary. $58k a year for running a site with millions of games per day.. deserves more. Is it because they don't get enough donations? Or saving the extra money for growth/buffer?
(edit: originally posted this as a top level comment but felt it fit better here)
Edit2: just checked. I've spent 11 whole days playing chess there (and not sure if that only counts games and not tactics etc). Made my first donation now.
>I feel like the developer/founder should have a higher salary.
This is probably the root of most of tech's angst: people thinking they're entitled to get rich just because they made /run something.
If you can live comfortably doing something as rewarding as making something like Lichess, what more can you really want? People are talking about FU money/financial independence, which I agree is nice, but you can totally get there on $58k/year by living below your means and investing.
The reason I say it leads to angst is when you expect more than a comfortable salary, you're imposing a higher financial burden on the overall system than necessary, which can sometimes work in the short term, but in the long term introduces drag on development/stability because those extra thousands you're personally socking away aren't going towards, say, getting a contractor to address little issues or going into the rainy day fund.
Gross avg. wage in France is $42700[1] if calculated with 12 months and no variable benefits. Mean would be more interesting, but I don't seem to easily find it.
It might sound weirdly low for someone in IT in the USA, but first, not everyone commands FAANG sales, and second, wages in the EU are comparatively low. With some seniority, you can rise to $100k relatively easily, but you have to sell your soul to either some consulting company or old Fortune-500 industries.
So could be the dev takes an above-avg wage which would be around junior to semi experienced level developer and just does what they want to do: build a chess community.
EDIT: I don't fully understand the tax part, but if the nonprofit also pays his taxes and he goes out with $54k net, he's doing very, very well for an EU country. I've just reached that level give or take and I have lots of seniority in a really profitable old economy country. If I would be gunning higher, I'd have to do consulting or go the people management track.
I recall an AMA on Reddit, where the founder said he is perfectly fune with his salary as long as LiChess stays free and he can continue doing what he loves.
That'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.
I don't have enough details about the exact setup, but the server cost looks excessive* to me. Especially those Xeon Gold and Silver machines (are they using managed hosting or what). Almost all of them are in single OVH data center too, that's not very robust.
* Compared to a certain German hosting provider, where I can get AMD EPYC 7502P with 128GB RAM for about 100EUR. Again don't know the arrangement, but with some effort they could add more servers, lower the cost and add Geo-resiliency.
Lichess 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.
lichess 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.
"(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.
Chess24 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.
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.
I 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
You 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
Readit News
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.
It seems like every financially successful developer out there came from a middle/upper class enviornment.
Once they smell money, it's always more, more, and more. If the get big enough they blame it on their shareholders?
Guys like Thibault are a different breed. They are rare. I have a feeling his payoff will be huge in the future, and it will be a combination of respect, and a fulfilled guilt free life.
I don't feel like arguing. Their must be few Horatio Algers out there banging away, and just want a comfortable life. It just seems like most people that's never ever enough once they get the whiff of financial opportunity. I truly believe Zuckerburg could have had a legitimate shot at running for president if it wasn't for greed. (He pondered running a few years ago with calculated photo op trips to the midwest.)
What we need is a system that incenctivises people like Thibault, rather than incentivise people to develop nastier ways to make people click on ads :)
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.
Been working on the learning community for about 5 years now.
I’ve saved up enough for a year, will be quitting In 2 weeks to go back to teaching and improving the experience and teach more students about good engineering practices.
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
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.
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.
... 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.
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
If I can be so bold as to offer one criticism of your site though, it was a bit confusing when I first clicked to look at it. The first page is a barrage of information none of which seemed relevant for my first visit. I clicked the links at the top of the page and ended up on completely different web sites with equally confusing first pages.
Eventually I did click and watch a scrabble game being played, which looked great!
I know lichess invests a lot of energy into catching cheaters, is that something you've had to look into? I imagine it's much harder to catch cheaters than in chess.
The algorithms have been successful at catching a nontrivial number of cheaters already, most of whom have admitted it and gotten their account back after a suspension.
It is a super cool problem - I think we can catch more with machine learning (the funny thing is, my day job is in fraud detection using machine learning, so there is some overlap :)
I thought Mattel only allowed their own online games to be called "Scrabble" RTM.
Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way to my employment.
I see this quite a bit on HN and I always thing it's silly, but this time it's particularly perplexing. Are you a lawyer for Mattel or something?
Maybe add more of a header section to explain the game or have a picture of what it looks like in a game?
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.
Here is the direct link: 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
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://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.
1 billion chess games per year, often with >20k concurrent users and and some very heavy-duty engine analysis occurring for some proportion of these games and they only spends $56k.
I have seen startups with only hundreds of customers spend 10x this on AWS by copying the fancy tools used by tech giants.
It is also interesting how little the creator pays himself ($56k) and how much he spends on data protection ($40k), taxes ($52k) and various administration tasks. I wonder if his time is as heavily skewed towards administration as his expenditure.
I would also like to meet this guy, buy him a beer/coffee and thank him for the value he has created:).
I had the chance to met him a few years back during a conference in France[1]. He is very friendly indeed.
1: https://mixitconf.org/en/2015/thibault-duplessis-lichess-org...
$1000/mo on a few frontend servers for only 20K concurrent users seems excessive.
I've seen simple $40/mo droplets handle 50,000 concurrent websocket connections with minimal latency without breaking a sweat.
$2000/mo on databases is also nuts, unless you're storing hundreds of terabytes at high redundancy levels.
(edit: originally posted this as a top level comment but felt it fit better here)
Edit2: just checked. I've spent 11 whole days playing chess there (and not sure if that only counts games and not tactics etc). Made my first donation now.
This is probably the root of most of tech's angst: people thinking they're entitled to get rich just because they made /run something.
If you can live comfortably doing something as rewarding as making something like Lichess, what more can you really want? People are talking about FU money/financial independence, which I agree is nice, but you can totally get there on $58k/year by living below your means and investing.
The reason I say it leads to angst is when you expect more than a comfortable salary, you're imposing a higher financial burden on the overall system than necessary, which can sometimes work in the short term, but in the long term introduces drag on development/stability because those extra thousands you're personally socking away aren't going towards, say, getting a contractor to address little issues or going into the rainy day fund.
It might sound weirdly low for someone in IT in the USA, but first, not everyone commands FAANG sales, and second, wages in the EU are comparatively low. With some seniority, you can rise to $100k relatively easily, but you have to sell your soul to either some consulting company or old Fortune-500 industries.
So could be the dev takes an above-avg wage which would be around junior to semi experienced level developer and just does what they want to do: build a chess community.
EDIT: I don't fully understand the tax part, but if the nonprofit also pays his taxes and he goes out with $54k net, he's doing very, very well for an EU country. I've just reached that level give or take and I have lots of seniority in a really profitable old economy country. If I would be gunning higher, I'd have to do consulting or go the people management track.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
I agree it's low for someone running the whole show, but then he is doing it as a non-profit.
Tech salaries in the US are really high compared to RoW, even once CoL is taken into account.
Deleted Comment
* Compared to a certain German hosting provider, where I can get AMD EPYC 7502P with 128GB RAM for about 100EUR. Again don't know the arrangement, but with some effort they could add more servers, lower the cost and add Geo-resiliency.
It’s also a great example of something born of and sustained by a community: a testament to the chess demography.
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).
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.
chess24 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTCNuQ2mGfW6-SpHpaze_g/vid...
en español 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.
Just looked it up and people actually donate thousands of dollars to a JS project?
https://opencollective.com/vuejs
Crazy.