Will Mojo ever become Open Source?
Mojo is a great language and has amazing potential but the fact that it is NOT open source like it's predecessor Python, is not cool. So will mojo become open source later on in it's development or will it remain proprietary and closed-source forever?
13 Replies
It will become open source in the future. In fact, it has started being opened. The docs were open sourced few months ago, the stdlib will be open sourced at the end of Q1 this year. There is no timeline for when the compiler will get opensourced though.
Is the compiler supposed to be open sourced ?
The main reason that the Mojo compiler is not open source just yet is because the project is not ready for external contributors. Managing a community of contributors is a lot of work. In all likelihood, open-sourcing the repo would just slow down the initial development of the language.
Furthermore, the compiler is currently written in C++, and it might be re-written in Mojo at some point. It would make sense to open-source the compiler after that re-write occurs.
Mojo compiler in Mojo? Isn't that what the Rust creators did?
Congrats @Hammad Ali, you just advanced to level 1!
I don't understand see how that benefits a language
It’s called self hosting, and many languages do that, with varying degrees of "self-hostness" and successfulness. People do this for many reasons. In the case of rust, a huge reason created rust is that they are not satisfied with the other system programming languages (looking at C++). Self hosting helps the compiler engineers better understand the language they are building, but also risk making the language "only good for writing compilers". Another benefit is it makes contributing to the compiler easier for new comers, as no knowledge of a separate language is needed.
It helps with more contributors
Just because you put the source code on GitHub does not mean you have to accept contributions (pull requests). I understand that would slow them down. But unfortunately a lot of people need the assurance of a source code, as well as a suitable licence to invest the time in learning a programming language.
I don't see any real reason they could withhold this from the community, other than being afraid of commitment.
I can think of one very practical reasons why they simply cannot open source the compiler.
They are building a product (MAX) using this half baked language, one can imagine all kinds of product specific hacks (that contain business logic) inevitably getting into the compiler. And by the nature of the said hacks, dumping source code on GitHub is just no go. If you follow the development of TensorFlow or Bazel, you shall see this kind of code leaking out all the time, after years of being fully open. It's only going to be worse for a younger project like Mojo.
Cleansing the stdlib is easier, so they can open source that first.
Good points.
It would be great to see these two things:
open source code and a suitable license -- not just to show commitment to the language but seriousness in ensuring its continuity.
In case the life goals of the language creators and maintainers change, then the next set of committed contributors can take over and at the very least commit to security updates and fixes if they cannot spend time to actively improve the language.
Modular: The Next Big Step in Mojo🔥 Open Source
We are building a next-generation AI developer platform for the world. Check out our latest post: The Next Big Step in Mojo🔥 Open Source