If we accept that Vas's income is closely tied to Rybka, then we have to accept that it's a truth that cuts both ways. If sales have slumped because there are now free engines of approximately equal strength to Rybka, then Vas may well need to move on to something else. (I have no idea if this is the case).
If Vas has lost interest in working on Rybka, whatever the reason, that would be a big loss to CC fans.
In previous notes, VR has implied that he doesn't consider money issues as central to his development of Rybka. The IEEE Spectrum
Game Boy article says:
The company pays Rajlich a salary, freeing him to spend his days refining the next iteration of Rybka.
”I don’t anticipate that I’ll ever have to make a decision based on money,” he says. ”If you’re a software developer, and you get to a certain age, you have to decide what you want to do, and do it.”
My own guess is that he loses interest, it will be because of the "more standard" issues the effort to implement new ideas seems to large, or that they are not likely to improve the engine much. Recall that he out-sourced the re-writing of the eval to LK, and appears more interested in the cluster version. There have been many others who disappear after 5 or maybe 10 years, and some of these then come back later. Burn-out is as common as in other jobs. Some have quit when "at the top", so it's not like VR pursuing other interests would be unprecedented.
