Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

@Ironusmaidenus said ^

I am looking forward to all the Lichess forks that come out of the controversy in this thread. Oh wait, the people complaining probably don't have the ability or resources to maintain such a platform.

Even if technically feasible, a fork would face an uphill adoption battle without the player base; everyone knows that, even TTT, which is why they pursued this deal.

That's just reality. No project gets adoption overnight unless it has a massive hype machine attached to it. We are lucky to have a platform that's features are not gated behind a paywall.

Or by exploiting the financial insecurity of one of the two established servers and hijack their userbase, apparently

Thanks for the update. I personally think this is going to work out great.

https://taketaketake.com/blog/lichess-partnership#:~:text=Magnus,%20launch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLxTR2MiJ40

So Magnus won't play at lichess ever or just not at launch!?

I think there are upsides and possible downsides to this move. But I do think some of the reaction on here has been way OTT.

Ultimately, TTT are simply providing an alternative portal to access Lichess. And people who use their portal will get their enhanced analysis of games (with description of move ideas) and their 'social network' idea (i.e. similar to Strava) and challenges (similar to Strava). They've said in the video they will start charging for using their portal to get these features that they have developed.

If you don't want to use their portal, and therefore get these features, you carry on using Lichess as now, and nothing changes. You get the same features you have now plus any new ones that Lichess can itself develop with its own funding from donations. TTT pay for (more than?) the added costs Lichess incur from using their servers. So it doesn't mean that any donations to Lichess go to support TTT. If anything it provides a bit more support for Lichess own development if the amount they pay slightly exceeds the cost of the server load.

As for the poster complaining that they thought it was about Thibault wanting a yacht.....Look at the published Lichess accounts. You've got a man here who, should he have wanted, could have sold this platform years ago for millions and millions and never have to have worked ever again. instead, he takes a smaller salary than a good many of the users on here. Certainly not extravagant or greedy. Indeed, more unselfish than I am in life.

I think this could be a great thing for Lichess and chess overall, but many people raise fair concerns. I like the comparison to Linux and too see the vision where Lichess the chess "kernel" like the linux kernel is, and "distros" like TTT being built on top of it.

Main concerns to me are:

• The ability to create my own "chess distro" is not free for everyone, only TTT with their corporate agreement.
• Lichess potentially not adding certain features to avoid competing with offerings on TTT.
• TTT abandoning Lichess after using it to break into the market.

I know that the Lichess API is available, but my understanding is that TTT will have access at a level we are not able to access. Reasons to disallow general access at that level could be fair play concerns, but a solution must be found. To me, this compromises the free/libre in Lichess.

Secondly, it is important that the compensation received from TTT for Lichess's resources must not influence or affect decisions on future improvements or features on Lichess. It is another compromise of the free/libre-ness of Lichess. This concern is mentioned in the blog post, but I am worried it is a slippery slope, tread carefully.

Finally, a concern is TTT uses Lichess to get started, and then moves to their own/another platform. The loss of Lichess players is not my main issue here-- anyone who wants Lichess would stay and anyone who wants TTT's offerings would go. The concern is the case could be that Lichess is simply being used to boot-strap this new platform and to get it into the market. This agreement with Lichess is likely the only way they could have gotten a solid foot into the market since a player base is so valuable. I do not feel very re-assured that Lichess won't be used/exploited in this way by "big corporate" (TTT or any other entity in the future that may be given similarly special privileges to Lichess).

Considering my first and last concerns, it is easy to feel like this is a mis-step from Lichess. We will have to trust the process, the Lichess team has done great so far, this is the greatest chess platform available and the vision of the "Lichess is the linux of chess" is very exciting.

@Toadofsky said ^

I'm quite surprised to see this partnership, if the partnership is just TTT building on top of Lichess lobby APIs than why is this official partnership needed? Alot of community and commercial projects directly/indirectly use Lichess APIs, and if TTT is building play zone which is tightly coupled to Lichess code, than shouldn't TTT code be open source?

Interesting questions, these. How does this collaboration differ from any other developer simply using Lichess APIs? There are several companies which sell e-boards and have closed-source mobile applications which allow you to play on Lichess.

it differs because Lichess is sort of officially involved, and Lichess is helping a company with their infra, typically its other way around, third party devs just use the API, ask for help in Discord and integrate. There is no real help from Lichess, but this one is quite different from that point of view. Also, they are building on top of Lichess. I was quite surprised Lichess didn't ask any code to be open-sourced in their app, not sure how this partnership is any benefit to the Lichess chess community; only TTT is benefited than Lichess itself. Lichess has always had user donations to cover the costs regardless.

I may have missed it, but what is it that TTT can do that Lichess can't?

but why lichess need ttt?

@chess6144560 said ^

Another point for discussion; by using Lichess, we are now all directly contributing to the success of TTT. Without Lichess players, their platform would be a ghost town, unable to attract any new users. Every time you log into Lichess and match against a TTT player, you are effectively adding value to their VC-backed for-profit company. In a very concrete way, by playing on Lichess, we are now helping to build the very next chess.com.

Lichess players didn't sign up to be the product that makes a VC-backed startup viable. I believe we chose Lichess specifically because it was the opposite of that.

I specifically stayed 100% on lichess for over 10 years exactly for their 100% non profit open source values.

I have been so proud to be a part of this great adventure and am very saddened by this.

Thank you Thibault and team and farewell.

Well nice to meat you same old same old profit chasing investors :) !

Take Take Take are a joke, look at the quality of space they provide for Magnus, no air, noise from office parties, continuous tech and audio issues. Not impressed. They took him for a ride and they are doing the same to you