Back in August Modular's Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Chris Lattner's company by Qualcomm. The latest achievement now out of the company is their MAX software being fully opened up with the entire source tree available.
Modular's MAX graph compiler, MAX runtime, and device extensibility hooks are now fully opened up as source available to the public. They are promoting it as "source available" rather than the traditional "open-source" as it does come with a new MAX license. The MAX license allows for building and distributing commercial products with MAX without any fees or royalties, but there are some restrictions on the source code usage. The license does not allow for AI-assisted re-implementations of MAX, commercial hosted inference services around MAX, or publication and distribution of modified source code.
They argue with these source restrictions in today's announcement as:
"Our intent is to encourage experimentation and innovation while ensuring that MAX continues to evolve as a unified software foundation. Developers are free to modify and experiment with MAX, and we want to make it as easy as possible to contribute improvements back to the project. The license’s distribution restrictions are designed to prevent fragmentation into incompatible versions of MAX, not to discourage individual developers from exploring new ideas. We recognize that there are many legitimate reasons to experiment with modifications that aren’t ready for upstream contribution, and we’ll continue working with the community to make sure our development and contribution processes support that innovation."
Modular's MAX is a high performance inference server with OpenAI-compatible endpoint for LLMs. Those not familiar with MAX itself can learn more at max.modular.com.
Opening up the rest of the source code to MAX was aligned today as part of the MAX 26.7 release