Chess has always had this dichotomy over free/paid services. (a bit not unlike programming tools). I love lichess.org but make no mistake: without the dedication of one talented Scala programmer willing to underpay themselves that site would not exist. Commercial sites can provide more services and offer more opportunities to chess professionals simply due to the funding model. Disclaimer: I've played over 100k onlin…
Open source in general wouldn't exist without lots of people who contribute and underpay themselves for it, but I'm not sure what I'm not supposed to be making a mistake about? Can you clarify?
With opensource tools businesses often do contribute back, via their paid employees.
This is because the business wants to use the tool, but wants some new features / bugfix, and the opensource license means they legally have to contribute back to the opensource project if they want to add that feature and keep using the project.
With lichess the players are almost entirely just consumers of a free product.
> Open source in general wouldn't exist without lots of people who contribute and underpay themselves for it
If you want proof this statement is wrong just look at the open source companies that were created by for-profit companies, such as React by Facebook, Visual Studio Code by Microsoft, or Golang by Google. These are some of the biggest opens source projects, developed by very highly paid software engineers.
All that said, of course there is many OSS projects out there maintained by some unpaid person doing it out of the kindness of their heart.
It goes both ways of course, when a business open sources their project they benefit from the contributions of others.