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Comment by msond | Hacker News Reader

We're going to be publishing more details on later blog posts and documentation about how this works and how we've built it.

Yes, we're not open source, however our license is very permissive. It's both in the software distribution and viewable online at https://docs.scale-lang.com/licensing/

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How about trying _Early_ Source?

It's open source with a long delay, but paying users get the latest updates.

Make the git repo from "today - N years" open source, where N is something like 1 or 2.

That way, students can learn on old versions, and when they grow into professionals they can pay for access to the cutting Edge builds.

Win win win win

( https://breckyunits.com/earlySource.html)

We're still thinking about our approach but this is a nice suggestion, thank you.

I'm curious, for what reasons are you interested in the source code yourself?

I'm not the person you replied to, and I can't speak for them. But I can say that for myself, and a not small number of other people, it's an ideological issue. I simply do not use software that isn't F/OSS - to the greatest extent that that is possible. For me, I might use a VERY small amount of non F/OSS stuff, but it's very hard to get me to adopt something new if it isn't.

Now should you make business decisions based on that? Probably not. But while I don't claim to be a representative sample, I am pretty sure the number of people who share my beliefs in this regard is substantially "non zero". shrug

Not GP, but a guaranteed source availability means users can fix issues themselves in the future if the original provider goes belly-up.

> I'm curious, for what reasons are you interested in the source code yourself?

I am the founder/editor of PLDB. So I try to do my best to help people "build the next great programming language".

We clone the git repos of over 1,000 compilers and interpreters and use cloc to determine what languages the people who are building languages are using. The people who build languages obviously are the experts, so how they go so goes the world.

We call this measurement "Foundation Score". A Foundation Score of 100 means 100 other languages uses this language somehow in their primary implementation.

It is utterly dominated by open source languages, and the disparity is only getting more extreme.

You can see for yourself here:

https://pldb.io/lists/explorer.html#columns=rank~name~id~app...

Some that might have become irrelevant have gained a second wind after going open source.

But some keep falling further behind.

I look at Mathematica, a very powerful and amazing language, and it makes me sad to see so few other language designers using it, and the reason is because its closed source. So they are not doing so hot, and that's a language from one of our world's smartest and most prolific thinkers that's been around for decades.

I don't see a way for a new language to catch on nowadays that is not open source.

Very interesting, thank you for sharing!

We do believe in open source software and we do want to move the GPGPU market away from fully closed languages. The future is open for discussion but regardless, the status-quo at the moment is a proprietary and dominant implementation which only supports a single vendor.

> I don't see a way for a new language to catch on nowadays that is not open source.

I do note that CUDA is itself closed source -- while there's an open source implementation in the LLVM project, it is not as bleeding edge as NVIDIA's own.

> I do note that CUDA is itself closed source

And this is a good point. However, it also has a 17 year head start, and many of those years were spent developing before people realized what a huge market there was.

All it will take is one committed genius to create an open source alternative to CUDA to dethrone it.

But they would have to have some Mojo (hint hint) to pull that off.

I'm a big fan of opensource for most things but if what you've got actually works, you could probably earn big money selling it. The biggest companies in the world are building / using this sort of thing.

Imagine the shift of capital if for example, Intel GPUS suddenly had the same ML software compatibility as Nvidia

This. Since Intel and AMD weren't able to produce a good solution to nvidia's moat yet, this should be worth serious money to them. No need to give it away for free.

On the other hand, if they want better adoption (which would drive sales of their hardware) then Intel / AMD should make a deal to release it as opensource. Closed source will make some profit, but not that much. If this thing really means that everything can run on AMD GPU cards today, then this is a game changer and is worth a lot.

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