Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

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Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

Take Take Take will use Lichess as the infrastructure of their new play zone, in a win for open source

Key details:

• Take Take Take will use Lichess as the infrastructure of their new play zone, in a win for open source
• No changes to Lichess, it will remain as it always has - free/libre and open-source software
• Players on Take Take Take will now be able to easily create Lichess accounts, and play games on Lichess through the Take Take Take app
• All of our players (those on Take Take Take or using the Lichess website or apps) benefit from everything Lichess promises - privacy, data integrity, and moderation
• Take Take Take will contribute to open source by contributing to Lichess directly and indirectly, including financially and with increased visibility

Earlier this year, Take Take Take approached us with a unique proposal. Rather than building their own proprietary play zone from the ground up (a “walled garden”), Take Take Take have asked us to share our “digital commons” and use our infrastructure and play zone.

At first, we considered the proposal with caution, and maybe even some wariness. Lichess has often been approached by companies who don’t understand us or our values, and just want to use or even exploit our players and community. But after careful scrutiny, and getting to know the team behind Take Take Take, we think this cooperation has the potential to be a real positive for chess as a whole.

For chess enthusiasts and players, it represents more healthy competition within the chess ecosystem. Competition and having more choice is inherently a good thing for any market, including chess. It forces money that was originally destined to be paid out as dividends or funnelled up to institutional investors to be reinvested back into chess. It means that innovation by making genuinely useful new features, or arranging major tournaments and events, must occur in order for a service to stand out. This ultimately improves what’s on offer to the chess community and to chess players, forcing all online platforms to step up their game. Healthy competition and a more diverse market should be welcomed by our peers who truly wish to grow the game.

Beyond supporting more market options within chess, we also view this as a major win for Lichess and for free/libre open-source software as a whole. Instead of Take Take Take building and maintaining another walled garden for millions of dollars, like several expensive foibles before them, they realised we already offer a free and available digital commons, and asked if they could help us expand it. By choosing our open-source software instead of building their own proprietary play zone, this is a significant recognition of our software already being the best in the market.

This kind of model is adopted quite often in the open-source space. For example, various Linux distributions are open-source, and are the backbone of the internet with the majority of web servers running Linux. But even though that code is open-source and can be used or forked, it’s the scaling and technical know-how which is packaged. Similarly, we’re providing Take Take Take the expertise of our developers, infrastructure, moderation and general operations, who have been maintaining and improving Lichess as a whole for over 15 years.

The games played using Take Take Take will be running on Lichess. New players, including those finding us via Take Take Take, will sign up for Lichess accounts, and they will play on our servers and use our infrastructure. They’ll have the same data rights and protections we give all of our community, and our same high level of moderation. Ultimately, they are Lichess games, being treated exactly like Lichess games should be treated. That’s Lichess becoming more than just a playing platform, but becoming an infrastructure layer for free online chess generally.

At the same time, our independence, our philosophy and values remain non-negotiable. Lichess will always remain free and open. Our software will always remain open source. Any play zone using Lichess must always be free to play, even if other tools are built around it which are not. And we must and will have complete integrity of user data, user privacy, and moderation actions.

Equally, the Take Take Take team have very much understood that, and given us a lot of openness and transparency. They understand that we’ve built something which began as a hobby site, and has grown into a major global platform, serving millions of players a day, instantaneously transmitting thousands of moves a second, giving the best experience for fast time controls. That we’ve taken technical optimisation as far as we can, but also organisational optimisation, with content, broadcasts, moderation, and administration being done on less than 1% of Chess.com's estimated annual revenue. They understand what we’ve achieved, and that’s why they’ve chosen to trust us to be their play zone. As the chess market has become increasingly monopolised, enshittified, and surely even corrupted from an original vision, we similarly must adapt to ensure the chess community isn’t trapped and exploited for private gain.

We’re intrigued and keen to see how this cooperation changes things within the chess ecosystem, as we stay true to our philosophies and values. While we can sometimes feel like an isolated pawn in a commercialised landscape, it’s always refreshing when we find like-minded allies who want the best for chess and recognise our vision for that. Now, through the unpredictable nature of the game, we find ourselves in a pawn phalanx with Take Take Take, and a global community supporting us and believing, like us, that chess belongs to everyone. We’re looking forward to sharing chess with more people, together.

*You can read the announcement from Take Take Take's perspective, on their site also.*Reuters

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While feedback to this announcement has broadly been positive, a number of members of our community have raised concerns that we want to address. These concerns are reasonable, and were also raised by members of the Lichess team during discussions about this cooperation agreement - so we definitely hear where you're coming from. The majority of the Lichess team are unpaid volunteers, who have given hundreds to thousands of hours to Lichess. Please believe that we also want what is best for Lichess and are committed to its values.

Are TTT just using Lichess's playerbase to kickstart their own app, and planning to run their own play zone in the future, effectively stealing the Lichess players? This was the initial concern from many in the Lichess team! The way we see it now, having more "players" in the chess platform ecosystem is a good thing, driving innovation. For us, strategically, there were several possible paths:

• TTT makes their own play zone and is successful - Lichess squished between two large corporate entities.
• TTT makes their own play zone and is unsuccessful - status quo.
• TTT makes a play zone with chess.com - monopolisation increases further, with limited options for the community.
• TTT makes a play zone with us and is successful - open source benefits.
• TTT makes a play zone with us and is unsuccessful - status quo.

Is it possible that TTT separate to their own play zone in future? Yes! However, Lichess will still be here, offering everything we do for free and without adverts or tracking - so we think we will still be able to comfortably compete - just like we do currently with other platforms.

Are Lichess users now the "product" for TTT, and are unwillingly commodified? The "product" is that we have provided relaxed rules regarding API access for playing games. This API access is already publicly available in a limited form to anyone else, including several commercial eBoard manufacturers.