> Polars will remain MIT-licensed and the company will sponsor and accelerate the open-source development of Polars.
I bet that they will change to a custom business source available license sooner or later.
From the about page: [0]
> We successfully closed a seed round of approximately 4M$, which was lead by Bain Capital Ventures.
Waiting for the day that a seperate closed-source version of polars gets built / forked privately and improvements do not make it back into the source.
Yeah so this is AI's MovableType moment - maybe. Mojo - a will-be-open-sourced-soon-we-promise fast python alternative targeting AI - is in the same boat. Saying they'll be open source, releasing stuff, but VC backed with the ROI impetus.
Quick history lesson: MT owned blogging, got VC backed, changed the license because capitalism, and everyone fled to WordPress which powers over 40% of the Web today. I think looking at the way Matt has run WP and the level of sensitivity he's had to have towards OSS/GPL in order to maintain the ecosystem and community, is instructive when it comes to the viability of an OSS AI VC backed C corp.
Yes. And it doesn't really make sense to make the library closed source. The common business model for these kind of tools is to provide consultation, deployment platform, or a distributed version.
Since they are the owners, they can do what they want with it no matter the license. The license only says what others who get a copy of the software can do with it.
I'm so sick of this debate. I really don't get it. You all want less useful software to be made by less software developers being paid less for their work? What's the game plan here?
> Polars will remain MIT-licensed and the company will sponsor and accelerate the open-source development of Polars.
I bet that they will change to a custom business source available license sooner or later.
From the about page: [0]
> We successfully closed a seed round of approximately 4M$, which was lead by Bain Capital Ventures.
Waiting for the day that a seperate closed-source version of polars gets built / forked privately and improvements do not make it back into the source.
[0] https://pola.rs/posts/company-announcement/