That's only while it's in development. Obviously, once ready, the toolchain will be available publicly. They can't release it now, though, because not all of their patents have been accepted.

> We plan to host a complete Mill development environment in the cloud for public use. It will, naturally enough, break. However, by hosting it ourselves we can capture what failed, and use that as raw feed for our test/debug team. This will give us much better feedback than releasing a SDK for user’s own machines, because users rarely take the trouble to file bug reports.

It seems like they're doing that now mainly to get better feedback. I can't imagine that rationale would make as much sense once their stuff is more stable.

At a minimum, you'd need to spend a stack of cash verifying that the EULA of the cloud compiler didn't include a "ALL UR INVENTIONS ON THIS ARE BELONG TO US" clause - would be only prudent given how intent the company is on planting its flag in IP.

Such paranoia is amply justified in our industry. However I expect that we will continue our iconoclastic approach to legalisms so long as the founders keep control. Our model for our cloud software follows the example pioneered by Greg Comeau; you can see his at http://www.comeaucomputing.com/tryitout/.