TalkChess.com

[Ilari Pihlajisto]

It's very sad news that you guys now have something more important to do than developing a free chess engine. But it's great news that Stockfish's commit tree will be publicly available. That's really the way to go for open source projects, and it makes it a lot easier for third parties to contribute their commits to be merged in the master branch.

Things may not go as smoothly as I hope though, because chess engine developers are notorious for writing unreadable code, ignoring documentation and coding conventions, making way too big changes, publishing too early, and not using essential tools like diff and version control systems. It's also generally hard to find people who are willing to contribute to a project that's not their own, especially if they feel that the development of said project is stalling.

My suggestion to you and Joona is to list some tasks (fixes, cleanups, features, optimizations, etc.) that you would like to get done, and describe the tasks well. Then it would be easier for third party developers to just browse through your TODO list and see if there's anything they could do.

Thanks again for Stockfish, it's one of the very best engines out there, and not just in terms of playing strength.