Stockfish vs Chessbase....Who Do We Root For?!?

[Stephen Ham]

Hi Dietrich,

I suspect we're both veering far from this thread's topic. Nonetheless, I respectfully disagree, especially with regard to a services industry niche, which ChessBase isn't.

ChessBase is instead a retailer, and not in a services industry. There, a quick "cheat" sheet is relatively meaningless as one variable, from many, is what the retailer elects to sell their product inventory for.

Anyway, I'm guilty of going off topic. So, I'll stop there.

All the very best,
-Steve-

[willmorton]

anybody knows what were their revenues before Stockfish or even Fruit?

[supersharp77]

anybody knows what were their revenues before Stockfish or even Fruit?

Breaking News...A Light Just Went On and I found some additional Info that may help us in this Problem...First Chessbase India Additional Info..... https://us.youtubers.me/chessbase-india ... d-earnings
ChessBase India net worth
$ 155K - $ 931K
ChessBase India income
$ 1.2K
last 7 days
Estimated earnings
$ 21K
last 30 days
$ 101K
last 90 days


Now Here Is The Real Revelation....Simple Search "Open Source As A Business Model Turns Up A LOT OF INFO"

https://rubygarage.org/blog/how-make-mo ... e-projects

"Most people, when they think of open source software, imagine enthusiastic and generous developers who spend their days and nights creating software for free. Indeed, for a few decades “open source software” was synonymous with “free software.” Developing software with open code through group effort excluded the opportunity for profit. But today there are ways to profit from building open source software (OSS). Lately, developers have started thinking about how to monetize their OSS. We're going to highlight a few common ways to make profits from open source software."
"Software as a Service (OpenSaaS)" "Paid support" "Dual licensing" "Paid extra features or functionalities" "Paid certification" ..."Conclusion
Open source software is highly regarded thanks to its security, reliability, and vibrant communities that support it. Moreover, OSS helps companies avoid reinventing the wheel, and can even be used within proprietary software. Altogether, these factors have made OSS quite popular. Today, people are willing to pay for open source software to ensure legal protection, technical support, and professional services. With paid open source technologies, companies can offer the best of both worlds: transparent technology with the support and features of commercial software."

https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/open-source-companies

https://opensource.guide/getting-paid/

"Table of Contents
Why some people seek financial support
Funding your own time
Finding funding for your project
Building a case for financial support"

"For others, especially when contributions are ongoing or require significant time, getting paid to contribute to open source is the only way they can participate, either because the project requires it, or for personal reasons.

Maintaining popular projects can be a significant responsibility, taking up 10 or 20 hours per week instead of a few hours per month.

avatar Ask any open source project maintainer, and they will tell you about the reality of the amount of work that goes into managing a project. You have clients. You are fixing issues for them. You are creating new features. This becomes a real demand on your time.

— @ashedryden, “The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community”

Paid work also enables people from different walks of life to make meaningful contributions. Some people cannot afford to spend unpaid time on open source projects, based on their current financial position, debt, or family or other caretaking obligations. That means the world never sees contributions from talented people who can’t afford to volunteer their time. This has ethical implications, as @ashedryden has described, since work that is done is biased in favor of those who already have advantages in life, who then gain additional advantages based on their volunteer contributions, while others who are not able to volunteer then don’t get later opportunities, which reinforces the current lack of diversity in the open source community."

https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-ope ... 4be409467/

"Table of contents
01
What every open-source company needs before it can consider making money
02
The 5 open-source business models
03
A business model layer cake
A guide on how to evaluate the long-term sustainability of the business behind any open-source software you are using (or considering working on yourself). Article co-authored by Mike Freedman.
(Interested in helping us build the next great open-source company?Timescale is hiring!)
As open source software becomes more and more popular, one of the most common questions we hear is: How do these projects make money?
Or, to put it another way: How do I know that these companies, who are building all this open source software I’m using, won’t go out of business?
And since we’re the co-founders of TimescaleDB, an open source time-series SQL database company, this question can also mean, How do I know that you won’t go out of business?
All are variations of the same straightforward question. But the answer is complex, and quickly evolving.
There is already a cohort of open-source software companies, some of which are public, that are surpassing $100M (or even $1B) in annual revenue: RedHat, Cloudera / Hortonworks (Hadoop), MuleSoft, Automattic (Wordpress), Elastic, MongoDB, Acquia (Drupal), Hashicorp, Confluent (Kafka), Databricks (Spark), and more. (Here are over 30 of them.) If we analyze their success, we see a common pattern to how they’ve built sustainable businesses.
In this article we describe that common pattern by sharing 5 business models these open-source software companies use to make money.
If you are adopting open-source software in your own company, or working on an open-source business of your own, or even just considering working for an open-source startup, understanding these business models will help you evaluate not just the software, but also the long-term sustainability of the business behind that software.
But first, there are two requirements every open-source company needs before it can even consider making money.
What every open-source company needs before it can consider making money

Prerequisite #1: Broad adoption

The first prerequisite is broad adoption: the open-source project needs to have a large user base and community.
Broad adoption is necessary because an open-source company can capture only a small amount of the value it creates. To be clear: an open-source company gives most, if not all, of its developed software away for free, and most of its users will never pay for that software.
In fact, most open-source monetization rates (the conversion rate from users to paying customers) are fairly small: often in the low single-digit percentages (if not lower). But given a large enough community, that conversion rate can be enough. This dynamic is one of the drivers behind the economies of scale in the open-source model. In other words, the need to have broad adoption is one of the reasons why there are often category “winners” in open-source.
This need for a large up-front investment in adoption is also why most successful open-source companies today start off as projects in a large company (e.g., Hadoop/HDFS at Yahoo!, Kafka at LinkedIn, Kubernetes at Google), as research areas in academia (e.g., Spark at Berkeley), or as VC-backed startups.
Prerequisite #2: Primary credibility

The second prerequisite is primary credibility within the community. This is important because it enables the open-source company to build an efficient sales and marketing process, which is especially important given the low monetization rates.
Having “primary credibility” means that anyone who needs help with the software reaches out to the open-source company and not someone else for assistance. Not having this credibility means having to slog it out with others in the market for that attention, leading to a far less efficient business model and lower margins.
The value of primary credibility, which today is often achieved by being the main contributors to the project, can be seen by comparing the market caps, annualized revenue, and multiples of Elastic ($4.59 billion market cap, $160 million revenue, 29x) and MongoDB ($3.97 billion market cap, $155 million revenue, 26x) vs. (pre-merger) Hortonworks ($1.23 billion market cap, $262 million revenue, 5x) and Cloudera ($1.73 billion market cap, $367 million revenue, 5x). (Market caps as of November 27, 2018; revenue numbers are from latest reported fiscal year.)
Because Elastic and MongoDB had primary credibility in their respective communities, they were able to build a much more efficient business model, and capture far more value with less revenue than either Hortonworks or Cloudera, who had to raise more money and fight fiercely over the Hadoop market. (One could even speculate that the need to possess primary credibility was one of the reasons behind the recent Hortonworks/Cloudera merger.)
Once an open-source company has broad adoption and primary credibility, it can build a pipeline of companies who need assistance, and start layering in a variety of business models to build a sustainable business.
Now, let’s talk about those business models.
The 5 open-source business models

From analyzing successful open-source companies today, five common business models emerge:
Support
Hosting
Restrictive licensing
Open-core
Hybrid licensing"

As Additional Information Comes in My Theory is "That Fat Fritz 2 (Based On Stockfish)" Threatens This Stockfish Open Source Business Model In Some Way... Don't Have Financial Info On Stockfish as Yet Though.. But After All This Time (Decades) They Would have figured some Ways To Monetize Their Open Source Operations...Discovery Should Bring This Out In The German Court for Sure...Time Will Tell..

[Cornfed]

Interesting.

But I wonder if in the end it may just come down to - did Chessbase's actions in any way cause 'financial harm' to Team Stockfish? If the answer is 'no'..."Chessbase, here is a little slap on the wrist, now go and sin no more...case dismissed".

[MikeB]

Hi Dietrich,

Why divide revenue by headcount? That's a meaningless figure given that margins vary from company to company.

Instead, profits per headcount is much more meaningful. But even that figure can be manipulated and contrived, for example, due to bonuses or extraordinary events/expenses.

The best measure of employee productivity is average annual cashflow per headcount. But then, you'd need to review years of corporate financial statements for that in order to see non-cash expenses (i.e. depreciation, amortization, and depletion).

All the best,
-Steve Ham-
Retired Credit Analyst

HI Steve,
Indeed, Operating Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow trended will spot problems early on, Free Cash Flow trended is is the most important indicator of a company's worth, don't trust me , just ask Warren Buffet. It has been his secret sauce for over 60 years.

Best regards,
Michgael Byrne
Retired Certified Public Accountant

[dkappe]

Hi Dietrich,

Why divide revenue by headcount? That's a meaningless figure given that margins vary from company to company.

Instead, profits per headcount is much more meaningful. But even that figure can be manipulated and contrived, for example, due to bonuses or extraordinary events/expenses.

The best measure of employee productivity is average annual cashflow per headcount. But then, you'd need to review years of corporate financial statements for that in order to see non-cash expenses (i.e. depreciation, amortization, and depletion).

All the best,
-Steve Ham-
Retired Credit Analyst

HI Steve,
Indeed, Operating Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow trended will spot problems early on, Free Cash Flow trended is is the most important indicator of a company's worth, don't trust me , just ask Warren Buffet. It has been his secret sauce for over 60 years.

Best regards,
Michgael Byrne
Retired Certified Public Accountant

You guys wouldn’t be accountants, would you?

It’s really more of a “you must be this tall” benchmark. If some company has less than $100k per employee in revenue, they’re probably struggling. More like $125k today.

[MikeB]

Hi Dietrich,

Why divide revenue by headcount? That's a meaningless figure given that margins vary from company to company.

Instead, profits per headcount is much more meaningful. But even that figure can be manipulated and contrived, for example, due to bonuses or extraordinary events/expenses.

The best measure of employee productivity is average annual cashflow per headcount. But then, you'd need to review years of corporate financial statements for that in order to see non-cash expenses (i.e. depreciation, amortization, and depletion).

All the best,
-Steve Ham-
Retired Credit Analyst

HI Steve,
Indeed, Operating Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow trended will spot problems early on, Free Cash Flow trended is is the most important indicator of a company's worth, don't trust me , just ask Warren Buffet. It has been his secret sauce for over 60 years.

Best regards,
Michgael Byrne
Retired Certified Public Accountant

You guys wouldn’t be accountants, would you?

It’s really more of a “you must be this tall” benchmark. If some company has less than $100k per employee in revenue, they’re probably struggling. More like $125k today.

Indeed, it is an important metric for companies that are human capital intensive , such as a software/developer product company. For some companies it is not that important since other costs rule the day and the revenue per employee is very high - but yes, when that metric is relalively low , I am certain other financial metrics are also suffering.