Author: Rolf Tueschen
Date: 03:44:17 01/10/06
Go up one level in this thread
On January 10, 2006 at 06:20:14, Marc Lacrosse wrote: >One of my friends is co-owner of the main chess shops in Paris and Brussels. > >He told me that he had negotiated with chessbase for one thousand copies of >Fritz9 at a lowered price. > >He sells other programs on order and told me that his global sales for all other >programs together is at least one order of magnitude lower than Fritz ones. > >As I asked him for his opinion regarding the potential influence of direct sales >of Fruit, rybka and the like, he said he was convinced that the effect of these >on his own business should be negligible in any foreseeable future. > >Marc That's it. And therefore, just therefore I think that it's kind of strange if someone NOW enters computerchess programming to start a career as businessman. The truth is you cant make a living out of chess programming alone. Certainly NOT as a newcomer. I dont know the background of Chris Theron, but his program was also VERY strong but he retired. His example alone would make me very suspicious if I were Vasik... I think that Fabien made the best out of it. He set a new standard with his philosophy about freeware. You can create a status with your ideas, your attitude, but NOT with the numbers of your sold programs. To the address of the many creative amateurs I want to say that success of a program isnt just strength alone, it's often not something they, the amateurs, did less well. Success has, as Hagra said here, to do with the limited span for informational digestion of chessplayers. Someone, some company is at the right place at the right time. He isnt "better" than others. Chess programming is a hobby, even more so than just playing in computerchess as a hobby. You can satisfy your needs and priorities and just your mind with chessprogramming, you can create an art, but your living, this is something you must make outside somewhere else. And if you want to have family and all that you should be responsible for your own life and decide to leave CC programming as a nice hobby behind as long as you must make a living. Otherwise you ruin your own future. Look at Bob Hyatt. Former World Champion. He brings the highest sacrifice thinkable on a daily base. He works in a place where his spare time does NOT allow him to even attend his beloved tournaments and to top it he must take all kind of irony and even mistreatments as if he were coward enough to chicken out of the circus. The truth is as I've said, a man who is responsible for his family, who has kids, and who also has a life outside of chess and computerchess, this man can't become a professional chess programmer in these times. If I could add a personal idea, because all this so far is common knowledge, I would like to inspire a sort of cooperation between young talents in programming chess who still have enough time and energy and older former chess programmers who know exactly where they had to leave and what ideas they still had in mind. Such a cooperation between generations could be a creative power for the best of computerchess in future.
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