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You can find the Stockfish project on GitHub. View the latest commits
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The Team
Tord Romstad
DeveloperTord is a professional mathematician and programmer, a hobby sprinter, and one of the world's least talented violists. He used to play chess when he was younger, and hated it so much that he ended up writing a computer program to do this boring and tedious task for him.
Marco Costalba
DeveloperMarco was a professional developer, a very weak chess player, and an amateur chess engine programmer.
Joona Kiiski
DeveloperJoona was a math teacher and used to play a lot of chess when he was young. Nowadays he works as a professional software consultant and uses all his remaining time to mind his children. Hopefully one day he will be back in the computer chess scene.
Daylen Yang
Web DeveloperDaylen is a high school senior. He built and maintains the Stockfish website. He also answers support questions and compiles the Mac version of Stockfish.
Salvo Spitaleri
Opening BookSalvo is the author of the excellent Stockfish opening book.
Jim Ablett
CompilerJim is an IT administrator and a chess engine compilation guru. He kindly compiles the Windows and Linux versions of Stockfish.
History
The Engine
The Stockfish project started with the open source Glaurung engine, authored by Tord Romstad. In November 2008, Marco Costalba forked the Glaurung 2.1 code and introduced Stockfish 1.0. Tord and Joona Kiiski joined the Stockfish project and the Glaurung project slowly faded away. Meanwhile, Stockfish quickly rose to become the strongest open source chess engine, with frequent updates every few months. Today, it remains one of the strongest engines in the world. (Source: IPON and CCRL)
The Website
- March 2010: Daylen Yang stumbles through some HTML tutorials and releases stockfishchess.com v1.
- October 2010: Daylen releases stockfishchess.com v2 after reading a CSS book.
- October 2011: Daylen releases stockfishchess.com v3 after his favorite text editor gets updated.
- September 2012: Daylen switches stockfishchess.com to stockfishchess.org to better reflect the open source nature of Stockfish.
About the GPL
Stockfish is free, and distributed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3). Essentially, this means that you are free to do almost exactly what you want with the program, including distributing it among your friends, making it available for download from your web site, selling it (either by itself or as part of some bigger software package), or using it as the starting point for a software project of your own.
The only real limitation is that whenever you distribute Stockfish in some way, you must always include the full source code, or a pointer to where the source code can be found. If you make any changes to the source code, these changes must also be made available under the GPL.
For full details, read the GPL.