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Comment by olympus | Hacker News Reader

They sell an enterprise version of Julia for $1500 per year. The main things you get are support, MS Excel integration, and a non-GPL license. They also offer consulting, training, and a few other flavors of Julia (large scale server based gets its own edition).

I'm sure the main draw will be companies that don't want to be stuck with a GPL license in their product.

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Isn't Julia licensed under the MIT license? They advertise being MIT licensed on their website, and their Github repository is also under the MIT license.

The core language is. The libraries are another matter.

From the website:

The core of the Julia implementation is licensed under the MIT license. Various libraries used by the Julia environment include their own licenses such as the GPL, LGPL, and BSD (therefore the environment, which consists of the language, user interfaces, and libraries, is under the GPL).

>They sell an enterprise version of Julia for $1500 per year.

$1500 per year

You can't support 100 people strong developer collective on proceeds from licensing of such product at all, given how small that commercial "data science" market is.

Maybe that's just the language, not the support?

How do they sell the non-GPL version? Just replace the GPL libraries like FFTW with inferior replacements like FFTPACK?

The non-GPL version uses Intel's proprietary Math Kernel Library (MKL) for FFTs, linear algebra, etc.

Huh, so did MKL just reimplement FFTW? I see that they have an interface for it. Or maybe they bought a GPL exception to FFTW.

They expose an FFTW-compatible API, but as far as I know it's an independent implementation.

So if I send a patch to Julia, do I have to give them the rights to GPL and a non-GPL version?

They advertise that Julia is MIT licensed on their website, so I think the parent comment is wrong.

They state "non-GPL" version on their website: https://juliacomputing.com/products/juliapro.html

The Julia core is MIT and thus not an issue. The issue with making a bigger GPL-free package is in libraries and dependencies (which I assume are either turned off, swapped out for non-GPL versions or have dual-license deals of their own for the gpl-free package)

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