marsninja (Jason)
MModular
•Created by grandunification on 9/9/2023 in #questions
Will Mojo eventually be fully open source?
I appreciate the insight and level of thoughtfulness around the approach. What you're saying make total sense. However, from a branding and marketing execution standpoint, Mojo has been presented to the community with an apple iphone level of competence. This is a testiment to the excellence of those functions at Modular, however does bring a lot of attention to Mojo as the next big thing in technology. To your guys' credit, I think Mojo lives up to this expectation and then some (though still under development). Perhaps its a communication clarity thing. This post you've made (which I'm very grateful for) is the crispest comms on your open source philosophy around Mojo I've seen publicly (that can just be my inability to find it). However, the key nugget I cant find from what I've come accros is where does the open sourcing process end, does it end at standard libraries, or compiler itself or some parts of it? Maybe thats not determined yet, but unclarity there may be a barrier to entry for some at this particular epoc.
TLDR; I get the philosophy, indeed I like it, but specifics are vauge at this point. Mojo feels like a launch overall (an impressively executed one). Clear comms (via perhaps a webpage called "Open Source Strategy" linked off of the mojo page) would be helpful. The work you're doing is legendary!
21 replies
MModular
•Created by grandunification on 9/9/2023 in #questions
Will Mojo eventually be fully open source?
Ok, Just read rule 6, I guess it extends to tag's too, wont happen again
21 replies
MModular
•Created by grandunification on 9/9/2023 in #questions
Will Mojo eventually be fully open source?
+ @TheRiddler @Jack Clayton
21 replies
MModular
•Created by grandunification on 9/9/2023 in #questions
Will Mojo eventually be fully open source?
+ @Chris Lattner
21 replies
MModular
•Created by grandunification on 9/9/2023 in #questions
Will Mojo eventually be fully open source?
Thanks for this crisp answer. I totally understand the rationale that its not fully open yet as the lang is still changing a lot. I do have to say that the develop-in-the-open style of open source (not accepting contributions) gives the community a lot of piece of mind that Modular is super serious about the decision and there won't be equivocation. Following something like Oracle's classic Java approach (lang is open, runtime is not) could make sense here. Indeed, simply open sourcing the formal grammar of the language (and perhaps the ast builder and data structures) sooner than later is enough to provide significant piece of mind. Indeed, I'd probably start hacking a simple toy compiler/interpreter right away to enjoy the beauty of the Mojo language in a more intimate way.
I mean think of it this way. There is nothing to loose and much to gain by Modular. I mean, releasing language docs and closed SDK but not giving the community a formal spec and toy implementation to munch on is the worst of all worlds. People get to see the key ideas of the language and syntax, and without being able to jump in to become full Mojo nerds and contribute or be a part, they may ultimately reverse engineer their own grammar and implementation that diverges but opens up before Mojo and Mojo can loose mindshare. On the other hand, since the cat is out of the bag, you can open up just enough to not give away anything more than what is already known, but have the community build tons of IDE plugins, and ecosystem tooling, and not have the core team be alone with the heavy lift of building both the general ecosystem and the juicy core lang / engine bits.
There's tons of hype right now around Mojo, so a bunch of folks would be excited to build good stuff for Mojo's broader ecosystem for free. But all we need is a little nod that instills the trust that Mojo is a forever thing. I don't know, Just a thought by a potentially huge fanboy!!!
21 replies