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Lichess is a non-profit association in France. Microsoft can't just buy it. If they have no money no more, they'll launch a donation campaign and if it doesn't work, they'll just put the site down until they have enough, then it can remain free forever. If the association ever breaks down, the code is out there for anyone to "reprendre le flambeau" . Thanks to them, being able to play chess online is a common good. They're not profit driven, they're freedom driven.

> Lichess is a non-profit association in France.

I don’t see any reference to this in the about pages. For this conversation in particular that seems like an important oversight if true. American nonprofits tend to list that stuff prominently. Maybe too prominently, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

That's literally what's written in the article.

As you say, that line is at about the midpoint of the article.

Your phrasing leaves it a little up in the air as to whether that is what the article is about, which I don’t think it is.

“That is literally what’s written in the article” is quite a different statement from, “That’s literally mentioned in the article.”

Yes, that’s mentioned in the article. Fine.

English is not my native language, I don't quite master all the subtleties.

From what I understood you hijacked the thread into something like "don't be gullible, nothing runs forever, they're lying" which misrepresented the point of the Lichess article which is that they won't charge ever.

Imagine sb reacting to an announcement that healthcare will be free with "Nobody lives for ever, don't be stupid, they're lying"

Hijacking threads towards your personal point of interest is fine I guess and is part of why HN is interesting to me but then it should be clear you are talking about your own thing and you should not artificially place it in the context of the post under discussion (especially if it turns out you have not read it through).

> Maybe it’s because I spend some number of hours a week looking at trees, but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid the average technical person is around the word “forever”.

If you truly want to be pedantic, the word "forever" does not appear in the post at all.

Less pedantically, I believe most people have the ability to understand that nothing lasts forever. From reading the post, the emphasis was on "free" and not on the longevity. Also the title of the post could easily be interpreted to mean "Why Lichess will be free for as long as it exists".

What’s the difference between “always” and “forever”? Do you think that’s a valid sticking point for people? I’m willing to rephrase as I don’t see a distinction that matters to any of my points.

> “Why Lichess will be free as long as it exists.”

Same problem. It’s built entirely on wishful thinking. Do you agree with all the choices you made when you were twenty? Do you agree with all of the choices you made after the first time you remember disagreeing with 20 year old you? What makes you think you aren’t going to disagree with half of what you think now?

Current you is going to have to win arguments with future you if you insist on any sort of concept or permanence. Especially since 75 year old you is going to think the concept of permanence is bullshit. If you’re not going to take any steps in that regard, or even plan to make them in the future, then you really don’t understand human nature very well, and probably not yourself either. That alone is worth some hours of quiet contemplation.

From https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61436/always-vs-...

> In some contexts they mean the same, but differ syntactically [...] In other contexts there's a difference in that always usually means continuously, at all [relevant] times, whereas forever usually means for an infinite amount of time into the future.

See the link for examples that might further clarify it for you. Obviously stackexchange is not a definitive answer space, but you can verify the differences from the linked post by looking the words up in a detailed dictionary, like the OED.

There's a big difference for good intentions that failed vs lying. I think you know that too. For $170 a month, it could easily switch to a patreon or other type of user contribution model. For $170 a month, it could be get a paper route to pay for it.

> There's a big difference for good intentions that failed vs lying.

That's true. Good intentions are more compelling, so they draw more people in and convince them more thoroughly, then cause more suffering in the end when everything falls apart.

   The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

- Feynman

Lying to yourself doesn’t socially have the same moral hazard as intentionally misleading someone, but the outcomes are often indistinguishable from the perspective of the affected parties.

All the guy is saying that $170 isn't a big amount for him, he is gainfully employed and doesn't expect to be short of funds to the extent that he can't afford to run the site. There is no need to bring "lying" into this.

> If you don’t have a trust set up to pay the hosting costs in perpetuity, you’re one recession or bad illness away from it being ad-supported.

You didn't mention that if the trustees commit a fraud, you are one bad trust away from it being ad-supported. Are you lying? What, you don't have anyway of knowing that it could happen and there are so many other things that can go wrong? Exactly.

People don't want to hear it. They want to believe in those promises. They like being told beautiful lies.

It’ll be interesting watching it play out over the next five or ten years.

We can’t be far from having a critical mass of people who realize all the stuff they’ve been eye-rolling at or downvoting is actually true, and then acting like they discovered something new. Half the time I’m just parroting people older than me. More field correspondent than discoverer.

> There are plenty of legal and financial constructs meant to approximate a forever status.

What are some examples of such legal and financial constructs ?

I think in general it was much harder and more surprising for Susan G Komen to become what it has than for YouTube to become what it has.

You can set up a non-profit, making it easier to accept money and adding friction to commercial entities trying to buy you out. Of course then have to chase operating expenses forever. You do well enough, you can set up a trust or endowments to operate in part off of investment profits, and now you don’t have to worry about one big donor trying to name everything after himself or twisting the mandate to their worldview.

Humans can screw anything up given enough time, but if your idea is good enough for copycats, then if your successors fail to keep the spirit of your goals alive, one of the imitators most likely will.

I’m sorry the free website hasn’t set up a trust for you.

I’m sorry a free website is blowing smoke up my ass about future plans. I’ve been hearing this same promise for longer than many Hackernews reader have been alive. It does not get easier to hear it with each retelling.

There are more than two states available here. An excellent time to announce always free is when you set up the trust. An excellent time to announce the intention to be free is when asking for advice or help with making that happen.

Edit to add: think about it this way. When a prospective love interest makes an oddly specific promise, does that make you feel more or less safe than you did before? “I’d never cheat on you with your brother.” “I’d never murder you and bury your body in Texas.” Well this was a lovely date, I’ll call you. But I have a busy week and a business trip so it might be a little bit.

I was already assuming lichess intended to remain free. Why are you telling me that now? Was that in jeopardy? Do we need to have a talk?

I don’t know what to say. I think you are extremely zoomed in here on a free chess website haha.

Entirely possible. I mentioned somewhere else in all of this grey text that I’ve been hearing this exact story for 25 years now and it doesn’t seem to get any easier to hear it from a new mouth.

Everybody says they’re going to do their new favorite thing forever and everybody either gets distracted, gets a new new favorite thing, or worst, gets shit on by life and has to backpedal. Just... Roll that good energy into literally anything else. Please.

> Or Microsoft could make you an offer you can’t refuse like they did with Minecraft.

[citation needed] for Microsoft blackmailing Minecraft owner(s).

They didn’t blackmail anybody, they bought it for $2.5 billion with a B. That is a titanically difficult number to turn down. It’s so much money that you can avoid having to look at people you told your former plans to.

"offer you can’t refuse" is not "really good offer", it is for cases of 'offer' coupled with blackmail or credible threats.

See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnOfferYouCantRe... (tvtropes of all things)

laydn posted a coat breakdown above that shows that the service costs more like $1,000/day to run, all in...

Depends a bit on your location also. In some countries, the social security is good enough that people can survive on them while doing whatever (low cost) hobbies they like. I've heard of a few academics continuing to do research while being supported by the unemployment money.

But yeah, some big company offering a crapload of money to buy lichess is also a problem. No-one is idealistic enough to refuse an amount of money that can support them and their family for the next two generations.

I should point out that I’m not just random internet grouch #435, but someone dabbling with this class of problem.

I’m trying right now to set something up that has the potential to have much more value to someone greedy than it does to my target audience. It’ll take a while I think before it really comes to that, but it is not out of the realm of reason.

I will most definitely be trying to take the temptation away from myself (or my heirs) to sell it. I would likely do that anyway, but the goad is that it costs more than I can really afford to write off unless I get very lucky, or others contribute substantially. There really isn’t much incentive for them to do that while I own everything outright. If I don’t want to end up with a cat food diet in my 80’s I’m probably going to need some of my investment back.

Worse, if the original author could not keep the site up some asshole would take the code base, start glichess.org and slowly take the credit for it all.

Of course lofty principles would be cited, like "this is how open source works" or "you should not have used that license if you hadn't wanted this to happen".

And many people here would defend the asshole and forget the original author.