A way to have more people like Thibault is to make it so the cost of living is extremely cheap, if not totally guaranteed. A society creates its people.

Yeah, a Portland or Berlin where one can retire young with low cost of living and do cool stuff...

/s ?

As someone living in Portland metro right now, either it's /s or misinformed. Portland hasn't been cheap since maybe 2010, maybe earlier depending on your definition. It may be cheaper than San Francisco, but certainly not cheap.

I read the comment as "a city like Portland, but…"

Same.

If you develop for a niche you care about, even not for profit, it shouldn't be hard to cover the bill (along with other day job). I'm doing so but in small scale so far.

I do agree, but most people want a lot of money. They might say they just want some protein in their noodles, but deep down they are a Zuck.

It seems like every financially successful developer out there came from a middle/upper class enviornment.

Once they smell money, it's always more, more, and more. If the get big enough they blame it on their shareholders?

Guys like Thibault are a different breed. They are rare. I have a feeling his payoff will be huge in the future, and it will be a combination of respect, and a fulfilled guilt free life.

I don't feel like arguing. Their must be few Horatio Algers out there banging away, and just want a comfortable life. It just seems like most people that's never ever enough once they get the whiff of financial opportunity. I truly believe Zuckerburg could have had a legitimate shot at running for president if it wasn't for greed. (He pondered running a few years ago with calculated photo op trips to the midwest.)

I don't think so. If there's one thing history shows is that the vast majority of people just want to live a serene life with comforts, but not necessarily luxury.

>It seems like every financially successful developer out there came from a middle/upper class enviornment.

I think this is more likely evidence of how many advantages being brought up in those environments gives in becoming financially successful. Not having to worry about paying for college, for example, leading to having more seed funding to be able to start working on your own projects, and potentially even having relatives provide that funding directly.

Even then, only the greedy find major success. Make the cost of living lower, and you see more successful people, specifically more guys like Thibault who are willing to do thinks the right way.

Where do you live that the middle class doesn't have to worry about paying for college? I grew up somewhere between working and middle class and by the time I got accepted into a state school my folks had earned just enough money to report to FAFSA that I didn't need aid -- but they had no significant savings with which to send me. Despite my father being a traditional engineer my whole life, and my mother had a career in social work.

I worked to pay for my tuition, and like many millennials, discovered this was insufficient, and had to take out loans. Eventually the financial exposure was too great so I dropped out because I couldn't afford it anymore and found a job writing code

And now I'm middle class, myself.

But I'm middle class for flyover country. If you don't have to worry about paying for college, because your parents can afford it out of pocket, I've got news for you: you're not middle class. You're RICH.

> Where do you live that the middle class doesn't have to worry about paying for college?

Europe, most likely... You know, those socialist countries where there is still a middle class.

I truly cannot fathom why anyone would Zuckerberg as their president.

Everyone's just looking for someone they can trust so they don't have to read and actively discuss things.

What you wrote reinforces the point of the comment you answered to, according to mine and I guess most users' here views.

Zuck'd have a shot at running if he had more than three facial expressions.

> We need more people like Thibault.

What we need is a system that incenctivises people like Thibault, rather than incentivise people to develop nastier ways to make people click on ads :)

Enable, not incentivise. Incentives are there, curiosity, community, gratification, etc. What people lack is the financial security to do nice things untainted with commercial interest, even in modern countries with proper welfare.

I can think of no better compliment: Lichess is the site, the eternal game of chess deserves.

I love absolutely everything about this. Thank you for sharing his story.

Free/Libre software has been built thanks to principled people like him. It's truly a collective effort. And corporations started to slowly eroding it from within.

What an inspiration! I’m doing more or less the same with c0d3.com

Been working on the learning community for about 5 years now.

I’ve saved up enough for a year, will be quitting In 2 weeks to go back to teaching and improving the experience and teach more students about good engineering practices.

Lichess is _impressive_ in itself. I was blown away when I found it was FOSS. Kudos to Thibault.

Impressive to see a French spending his own money between jobs, instead of using the advantageous unemployment salary in France!

He may as well be a millionaire in the future. By having a platform that people use you do get a minimal amount of bug fixing and stability of the platform. Lichess is a platform for companies to use it for their purposes with some tweaks here and there it can be an education platform, a platform for engineers to practice the internals of machines and many more possibilities.

Joomla is open source and their devs make so much money selling plugins and widgets. Who is the best man for the job to tweak the platform than the developers who made the open source core of it?

I use lichess everyday for years, the stability of the platform is absolutely top notch. An absolute minimal amount of bugs, no glitches in the website, every page i click on, loads instantaneously. The commercial website Chess24 and closed source, doesn't have "ultrabullet' games, very quick games of 15 seconds, because their platform cannot support it. lol

I think the "plugins and widgets" path to making money easily ends up being detrimental to the original free thing. Instead of spending time just improving the thing, one ends up carefully planning out what can acceptably be broken out separately, how to make the thing extensible, billing, advertising, funneling...just all kinds of garbage.

Eventually you end up with a load of staff who are dependent on the thing for their livelihoods, and that influences decision-making. Next up is selling to a company with big resources "to empower us to complete the original vision" and soon after a new scrappy upstart releases their free alternative, to start the cycle again.

Very true, the vision of the system may alter a little bit, if in the future there are commercial sponsors. Every new version will have to be more conservative, so as not to break compatibility, development will slow down, more bureuocracy etc.

I think the future of education is portraying it as a game, history as a game, engineering as game etc and solving puzzles along the way. Lichess as a platform may be useful in that regard, because a game to be enjoyable doesn't need to have all the fancy 3d graphics.

Joomla. Have not heard that name in a very long time.

Do you know how many children he has? That would be the easiest way of getting more people like him.

I understand your point, but children are not guaranteed to be like their parents, and many gifted people are actually poor parents.

In general children are more likely to be like their parents than non-children. That’s the rule, of course there are exceptions.