Please stop developing free Stockfish

[Robert Flesher]

Everyone by now knows that Stockfish is being developed for free.
I have a plan to get the authors out of this "Free Stockfish Problem".

1. Do not offer anymore free versions of Stockfish.
2. Announce that anyone can submit an improvement or upgrade.
3. Announce that Stockfish is going commercial.
4. Keep improving Stockfish as you are now.
5. Once a considerable elo has been gained, offer that version for sale for $75 to a $100 or whatever the market will pay.
6. The original authors can keep 50% of the profits and split the rest to the others that contributed to the improvement.

kgburcham

Needless to say that there is no Stockfish problem, and the only problem here is YOU.

But what you propose simply cannot work. The point is that the current development process of SF can ONLY work if SF is open source. This is not a philosophical point, but a technical one. It is not open for debate. It is a fact.

Considering that SF can only stay open source or die. This is because a single programmer (or a team of two) working on his/their own closed source has no chance of going defeating open source machine in the long run. Everybody knows that, even Robert Houdart has admitted it.

If SF is open source, it means anybody can download the source code, compile it and run it. So why would people pay for it? Perhaps some IT-challenged people like you who cannot use a compiler would pay some third party to compile it for them, but I don't expect the "free market" will rate that very high in $ terms. There's already abrok.eu that does it for free on a daily basis anyway, so it's hard to charge for it.

And even assuming there was a way to charge for it. How to you distribute the money? It is very complicated to set up, and clearly not worth it. Then how do we decide who gets how much? There will be and endless amount of politics involved which will kill the project for sure.

To summarize, what you propose is plain stupid, and even if we lived in the parallel universe where what you say makes sense, it would still be plain stupid.

+1

[Sylwy]

Everyone by now knows that Stockfish is being developed for free.
I have a plan to get the authors out of this "Free Stockfish Problem".

5. Once a considerable elo has been gained, offer that version for sale for $75 to a $100 or whatever the market will pay.
6. The original authors can keep 50% of the profits and split the rest to the others that contributed to the improvement.

kgburcham

Implemented:



SilvianR

[sicilianquake87]

Everyone by now knows that Stockfish is being developed for free.
I have a plan to get the authors out of this "Free Stockfish Problem".

5. Once a considerable elo has been gained, offer that version for sale for $75 to a $100 or whatever the market will pay.
6. The original authors can keep 50% of the profits and split the rest to the others that contributed to the improvement.

kgburcham

Implemented:



SilvianR

Good one.

[lucasart]

Implemented:



SilvianR

Nice!

[Sedat Canbaz]

Everyone by now knows that Stockfish is being developed for free.
I have a plan to get the authors out of this "Free Stockfish Problem".

5. Once a considerable elo has been gained, offer that version for sale for $75 to a $100 or whatever the market will pay.
6. The original authors can keep 50% of the profits and split the rest to the others that contributed to the improvement.

kgburcham

Implemented:



SilvianR

[Uri Blass]

Everyone by now knows that Stockfish is being developed for free.
I have a plan to get the authors out of this "Free Stockfish Problem".

1. Do not offer anymore free versions of Stockfish.
2. Announce that anyone can submit an improvement or upgrade.
3. Announce that Stockfish is going commercial.
4. Keep improving Stockfish as you are now.
5. Once a considerable elo has been gained, offer that version for sale for $75 to a $100 or whatever the market will pay.
6. The original authors can keep 50% of the profits and split the rest to the others that contributed to the improvement.

kgburcham

Needless to say that there is no Stockfish problem, and the only problem here is YOU.

But what you propose simply cannot work. The point is that the current development process of SF can ONLY work if SF is open source. This is not a philosophical point, but a technical one. It is not open for debate. It is a fact.

Considering that SF can only stay open source or die. This is because a single programmer (or a team of two) working on his/their own closed source has no chance of going defeating open source machine in the long run. Everybody knows that, even Robert Houdart has admitted it.

I do not agree that everybody knows that.
People who work on their own closed source have their secrets so they have a good chance to beat stockfish in the long run if they use some good ideas that give 60 or 100 elo that stockfish does not use.

Robert Houdart is only one programmer.
It is also possible that his opinion that he cannot beat stockfish in the long run is wrong.

[ouachita]

I said this many times here

[sainzlei]

Surströmming is more good !

[Adam Hair]

Surströmming is more good !

By the way, I think that the winner of TCEC should be awarded a case of surströmming.

[ouachita]

ask Marco if he likes sardines