About
Development Status
Reduced Development Pace
In October 2011, Marco and Joona announced reduced roles in Stockfish development. Read his post on TalkChess.
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. He still is a very weak chess player and still thinks that he is 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 DesignerDaylen is a high school junior who has winged his way through HTML and CSS and is now setting out to tackle real programming.
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.1
The Website
In March 2010, Daylen Yang stumbled through some HTML tutorials and registered the domain name "stockfishchess.com". In October 2010, he redesigned the site after reading a CSS book. And a year after that, he redesigned it again after his favorite text editor got updated.
Legal
About the GPL
Stockfish is free, and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). 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.
Design Assets
This website was designed and coded by Daylen Yang and is copyrighted © 2010-2012. All rights reserved.
The Stockfish icon was designed by Klein Maetschke. Unauthorized use of this icon is not allowed under any circumstances.