Lichess is one of those examples where the open source alternative is actually the best and most well known.
I 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.
Why Lichess will always be free
251–260 of 477 posts
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but those commercials have no cultural significance. It's just stuff you remember.
You are right, of course. But isn't "cultural significance" just another way of saying "stuff people remember?"
A literature teacher of mine would say, "culture is what you remember after you've forgotten everything about my class".
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you open the window do you feel the roads, houses or buildings you see are an attack on your attention? That your own house is an attack on the attention of others? That people would rather just see the raw nature that was there before?
Yes, I do sometimes.
Absolutely. Modern architecture, coupled with politicians and developers’s greed and the lack of urban planners care, can be an attack on our intelligence, our senses and our basic human aesthetic needs. It’s not just about capturing our attention.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
> 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. Exactly. The non profit is registered in a small town of Maine-et-Loire.[1] Assuming this is close to wher…
> €42k
Note that a competent full-stack Scala developer like Thibault can easily make €70-80k at a French company while working mostly/fully remote. And even more so going into contracting and/or working for foreign clients.
He has his own reasons, working on his own thing being a huge one obviously, but he could definitely make more and keep a similar lifestyle.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#255Thibault 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 f…
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.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#256Thibault 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 f…
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
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty much mandatory to have (yet another) addon to disable autoplaying videos, sadly. I think I hate this more than ads, honestly (not all autoplaying videos are ads).
Firefox lets you do this without need for an addon. Stop using an ad company's browser if you don't want to see ads; there is a huge conflict of interest.
Google also almost entirely finances firefox development.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#258The world needs Libackgammon!
You 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.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#259Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#260> 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/…
People go to your web development blog because they want to read about web development. They didn't go there for VPS advertisements. Make a specific page for that so that anyone who wants to know what hosting services you recommend will seek it out and visit it.
Anything else means you're selling your reader's attention to the highest bidder. You're deliberately adding noise to your website and reducing its usability. Also it immediately introduces conflict of intetest: you're associated with the company you're advertising so any positive opinions you might have about their products ought to be taken with several grains of salt.