Hmm, I've been under the impression that at one point they said it'd be 100% FOSS by the time 1.0 hits, but maybe I misunderstand/misremember the details. But I remember they'd said it'd be FOSS in connection with 1.0, seems weird to do it this way instead of waiting until it's all FOSS then cut 1.0.
Make of that what you will.
A compiler promising source stability is a different commitment than the compiler’s code being ready for outside contributors. Which is also different to having ABI stability, which took until 5.0 for Swift to achieve (I think Mojo does not have ABI stability as a goal as it doesn’t have to link to OS frameworks).
If Mojo's goal was to make evolution easier, they would have a limited closed beta like what Jai does. But they're not doing that; they make the toolchain available to everyone, they just did this marketing push around releasing version 1.0 of their language. They're making it harder to make breaking changes by seeking users among the general public.
I have no idea why you started talking about outside contributors though, nobody's arguing that they should accept outside contributions. You do t have to do that. It's a completely orthogonal issue to what we're talking about, which is releasing the code under a FOSS license.
I feel like they're going to remain closed until Qualcomm is convinced they can't make any money from it being so.
The alternatives would be stuff like CUDA
OTOH Python itself is the world’s most popular programming language, yet has only recently had the money to support more than a single full-time developer.
This doesn't compete with Python.
Like if someone wrote a competitor to VHDL that looked like TEMU Python... Python would not be its competitor, VHDL would.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/cutile-jl-brings-nvidia-cu...
Clang actually has replaced most GCC forks exactly because vendors can keep the fork closed source.
It was just a different culture. There was no expectation that everything should be free.
AMD/NVIDIA/Intel now having first class support for Python DSLs or GPU JITs for their APIs, and Julia as well.
In fact, GCC was largely ignored until Sun decided to split SunOS into two SKUs.
As I said, C was not "closed source", it was distributed with source under a proprietary license. And "all the UNIX clone vendors" didn't exist for years after the UNIX tape was first released. And they weren't "clones", they were enhanced supported versions of the AT&T system. I worked for nearly a decade for the first of those commercial UNIX vendors, ISC ... the other prominent ones were SCO and Wollongong. (Sun came along later, based on BSD UNIX, developed for the VAX and of course derived from AT&T UNIX ... none of these were "clones" ... the first of those was Minix, and then GNU/Linux). We all distributed UNIX with the AT&T C compiler. Eventually ISC wrote their own C compiler for IBM's AIX project because IBM always had special requirements ... I don't know whether we distributed the source or not.
But the point is that this was nothing like the situation with Mojo, which currently has not released the compiler source ... which is nothing like what people on this page are writing, because it will be open source SOON, probably coincident with the conference later this month.
I won't respond further about this.
Mojo addresses the actual need to write code in other languages, such as C++ or CUDA, for low level and hardware specific work.
But I wonder if it has already missed the AI hype cycle, when a lot of low level code is being written. I'm not sure how the developer ecosystem will react now.