Lichess Chief Operating Officer Theophilus Wait explained whether their platform needs to beat Chess.com. Theophilus says that Lichess has already achieved the objective they set. Wait notes that they plan to progress beyond what has already been achieved. Theophilus spoke about it in an interview with Chess with Mustreader.

Theophilus Wait

Theophilus Wait

Lichess Chief Operating Officer

“[Question: Do you think about Chess.com internally? For example, when you take decisions, do you think of them as your main competitor?]

It’s completely different perspectives, to some extent. Obviously, they exist, and they’re very big in what they do. But I wouldn’t necessarily view them entirely as a competitor, in the sense that I think what we’re trying to achieve is very different.

And you said about getting market share, or trying to win this struggle or whatever. I would say in some ways we have actually already won.

Because Lichess’s code is open source. We’re very big. If anything ever happens to us, people can just make copies of Lichess, essentially.

And this already happens around the world. There are lots of local copies of Lichess which people have made and developed. The code is now out there, and we will always be able to have some kind of free online chess platform.

So, I would say, in some ways, some of the mood within the team is that we did actually achieve the objective that we set out to do. And we’re now thinking about how to go beyond that objective.

We wanted free chess for everyone, forever. With the code being available to everyone, open source, and all of this being available. It feels like we’ve kind of achieved that. So, we need to think about the next steps and the kind of way to progress beyond that.”

Lichess.org is the second most popular chess platform in the world. They have over 8 million monthly active users. The platform’s source code is publicly available on GitHub. The Lichess repository is updated by more than 500 contributors and has more than 19 thousand stars.