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Comment by Lichtso | Hacker News Reader

Technically soruce available now with the promise of accepting contributions (thus becoming fully open source) early next year. But since it is an Apache 2 license (like the rest of the LLVM project) you are already allowed to fork and contribute to your own fork right now, just no upstreaming.

For many the closed source nature of the compiler was a knock-out criterion. We will see if Mojo can gain traction now or if it has missed its window of opportunity.

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It’s open source under the Apache 2 license, not source available.

Accepting contributions is not required to be open source.

SQLite doesn’t accept contributions from random people either [0] (though you could argue being public domain isn’t being open source).

Anyway, this is great, I was waiting for this to take the language for a spin! Congrats to the Mojo team!

[0]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/29/copyright-release/

Maybe it is not listed by the OSI, but it is 'open source' in practice, if the source is also in the public domain. The FSF's definition of free software makes more sense not only ideologically, but also because it does not try to be exhaustive.

One problem is that a large part of Europe doesn't understand the concept of public domain. I'm not legally allowed to not own my creation, except by transferring it to someone else. That's why licences like CC0 exist.

You're just making up your own definitions of things.

If the complete source is available and distributable under an OSI-approved license, it is absolutely Open Source. Accepting outside contributions is nowhere in the definition of Open Source.

It seems like the same sort of category error that some people make regarding free speech.

Just as you can say whatever you want, but facebook/twitter/reddit/whoever is not required to give you a soapbox, you can download this software and make whatever changes you want, but nobody is required to give a shit about your proposed changes.

Technically, the criteria for open source is freedom to freely distribute and modify the source code, not to upstream changes. That's a different for thing.

https://opensource.org/osd

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