May I suggest that perhaps you should spend a little time actually scanning through the Forum topics... Your answers are there
No -ck has not retired per-se, he is a medical doctor and
still runs the solo.cksolo pool but yes for a long t*he* ime no longer supports any cgminer code and closed its thread here in the Forum. For him coding was always more of a hobby.
That said - Kano who was the 2nd primary developer of
cgminer DOES still fully support it and is the only one continuing active development. Kano IS and always has been a professional coder so his code is well tested and solid. No dev fee crap or any other nefarious crap in it.
ONLY download from that link because yes there are MANY hacked versions out there with who knows what code in them. Kano's latest version currently provides support up to the Bitmain s17 chips with s19 in the works (both for Sidehacks miners).
