Why is Lichess free? (2014)

I am not against compensating anyone for work they do.

That being said, its been my experience that there is something rotten in that group of people. Thibault likes to be the face-man, but there are others involved in running things as he can't be available all the time.

From what I've seen, the group acts and behaves similar to many businesses that have something to hide. Either some kind of fraud or other unlawful act going on. This comes as just an opinion because there are practices in the ways professionals conduct themselves, and then there is the absence of those safeguards.

Almost always, in the absence of safeguards there is some kind of shennanigan playing out, and from the little information they provide, they lack those safeguards.

While, there is no direct evidence to support this opinion only because they don't provide anything, I do find the absence of certain things interesting.

Like for example, in a normal charitable organization, you have an annual budget, and a report of the actuals (what you spent), and its updated regularly in quarterly reports with minutes made and published by the board of directors (open for general outlays, and closed sessions for bidding/contract negotiations).

Yes, they have a budget, but its missing key pieces of accountable information and they don't publish actuals, this isn't line item level entries this is a breakdown of categories and cash-flow. From what I can tell its not updated regularly or with written minutes when it is updated and the budget doesn't go through a process of pro-forma to approved or have published annual reports, this is a major red-flag to me, and many other professionals and usually there is some kind of independent audit required when amounts go above a threshold every so often.

Second, France requires certain things to open a charity/business bank account (to not comingle funds), and from what I can tell from public records Lichess hasn't done that.

So this brings on a flurry of questions I would normally ask when examining records like this such as, so whose account is the money being held in... are funds being comingled, are the items being rented at a colocation (individual) being charged more than regular price for such activity, are there elements of a kickback scheme, etc.

Lichess has built a lot of goodwill, but they also don't run things professionally, and when you don't run things professionally, it looks more like you are doing something wrong, more so than is easily explained as just an honest mistake.

I have to wonder what kind of scheme is going on because lets be clear, they wouldn't be doing this for more than a year or two if they weren't making money, and as they've been going for much longer than that there are questions that any reasonable person should ask, primarily to bolster Lichess' credibility, it would be in their interest to do that but they don't or haven't and anytime those questions get asked a concerted group of online others choose to downvote or denigrate.

It is so clockwork and mechanical solely based on a basic perceived sentiment, that it begs the question of if those people who are responding are even real because today you can easily spin up a chat-gpt model to de-amplify one negative voice with sufficient infrastructure, perhaps under the guise of public affairs/image management. Anyone who knows anything about IT knows that has been happening, just look at reddit. Its even easier on HN news because no email validation required and these questions, are very modest questions that should have concrete answers, but based on my research, don't.